Human Cause or Natural Variation: Attribution as a Precondition for Environmental Regulation
Keywords:
Causal Attribution, Environmental Regulation, Groundwater Abstraction, Land Subsidence, Anthropogenic DriversAbstract
An environmental rule can only address the part of a change that human action produced. Establishing that share is an attribution problem, and where it is unresolved a regulation is written against an unknown target. This study examines attribution as the causal step preceding environmental regulation. The method is a structured conceptual review of research published between 2017 and 2024 on groundwater and subsidence modelling, extraction monitoring, land-cover change and water service delivery, classified by whether the study separates anthropogenic from natural drivers. Attribution is achievable and has been achieved: one coupled model finds climate change alone producing no notable change in recharge while confined heads decline by up to 29.51 metres by 2100 under current abstraction, concluding that projected status is dominated by anthropogenic activity; a global model trained on more than 46,000 observations finds abstraction intensity positively correlated with subsidence rate. Where attribution is absent the regulation is miscalibrated: one study found every modelled abstraction scenario formally satisfying the existing rule while producing depletion, saline intrusion and subsidence. Governance framings that treat physical change as quasi-natural pre-empt attribution rather than following from it. The study proposes that an attribution statement accompany any environmental rule setting a quantitative limit.References
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