How do I Justify Environmental Monitoring Sites?

Environmental monitoring sites are places where scientists carefully watch certain environmental phenomenon. Your local municipal waste treatment facility and the scientific outposts in Antarctica, are both monitoring sites. Justifying these sites can be complicated at times. It requires you to look at what the purpose of the site is, how badly it's needed and what the potential complications are if it stays and if it goes.

Things You'll Need

• Purpose
• Documentation
• Predicted risks

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Instructions

• 1

  Examine the purpose of the environmental monitoring site. Some sample purposes are observing the ground water contamination in a given area, solving a population drop in a natural species or checking the environmental impact of a dump site and seeing what damage it's causing to the surrounding populations. All environmental monitoring sites must have a purpose, and the more important the purpose the easier to justify the site monitoring becomes.

• 2

  Display results of the site. If the site already exists, or if preliminary research has been done, offer up the results of what was found. As with any science project, the more results a project can offer the more likely it is to be justifiable. If a project managed to turn up water contamination and stop it before it hurt the population, that is a good result to use for justification. If the site discovered an endangered species or new scientific material, you may use that data to justify the monitoring.

• 3

  Compare the cost of the work with its overall mission. For example, monitoring hazardous waste is expensive but you are protecting people from harm. Once you've established the list of benefits and drawbacks, see which one is bigger. If the site provides more benefits than drawbacks, or if the risks of closing the site are too much of a danger to the population, then the site is justifiable.