Decision Making for the Environment Social and Behavioral Science Research Priorities (2005) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
6 Decision-Relevant Science for Evidence-Based Environmental Policy
6 Decision-Relevant Science for Evidence-Based Environmental Policy
Pages 85-111
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 85... ...
These efforts typically produce highquality science, but they have repeatedly fallen short in addressing the questions most important to societal decision makers (Oversight Review Board of the National Acid Precipitation Action Program, 1991; National Research Council, 1996, 1999b, 1999d, 2001a, 2004c) : they have failed to produce the right science for decision making.
|
From page 86... ...
BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE Government should implement the strategy of seeking decision relevance in each area of environmental policy. This will require four kinds of research activities: (1)
|
From page 87... ...
The roles of the various participants should be defined to promote the achievement of these goals. DEVELOPING DECISION-RELEVANT INDICATORS Social science and natural science research should be integrated in a comprehensive approach to developing indicators that are relevant and usable for environmental policy.
|
From page 88... ...
88 DECISION MAKING FOR THE ENVIRONMENT states of the biophysical environment but also human influences on nature and the impact of the physical world on humans. People involved in decisions that affect the environment need information to help them understand the ways in which possible decisions may affect pressures on the environment and for anticipating and assessing the effects of decisions on things people value.
|
From page 89... ...
The Research Need Indicators are necessary for rationally formulating, implementing, and evaluating environmental policy. In most situations, indicators are the only environmental reality that decision makers see because the environment itself is too vast and intricate to be perceived directly.
|
From page 90... ...
Indices that combined diverse types of data were generally frowned on because, in the view of many statisticians, too much detailed information was lost when the data were combined into indices. Ecologists have dominated the two most recent indicators efforts, the Committee to Evaluate Indicators for Monitoring Aquatic and Terrestrial Environments (National Research Council, 2000)
|
From page 91... ...
, climate forecasting (National Research Council, 1999a) , radioactive waste management (National Research Council, 1995)
|
From page 92... ...
Because of these different positions, some individuals face greater risks than others from particular sources of pollution or types and locations of resource degradation, and their exposures to risks and opportunities affect the kinds of information they need most for their decisions and the kinds of indicators they find useful and credible. Spatial decision support tools are being developed that can help illuminate the spatial and temporal aspects of particular environmental pressures or conditions, such as climate change, flooding, habitat degradation, and the transport of pollutants, but far less is known about how to illuminate the socioeconomic or cultural aspects of the uneven distribution of environmental risks and benefits across human populations.
|
From page 93... ...
Assessing the value and utility that decision makers and the public place on various indicators and discarding the least effective is another. Users' concerns have led to interest in issues of environmental justice, especially in the context of evaluation of environmental policies.
|
From page 94... ...
Special efforts may be required to enable rapid development of indicators under conditions of surprise or disaster. It is impossible to develop indicators for every environmental policy situation that may arise.
|
From page 95... ...
There is no academic discipline or set of journals associated with developing the kinds of comprehensive environmental indicators needed for policy decisions in the United States. There are social scientists working on related kinds of indicators, for example indicators of sustainable development and of vulnerability to climate change, but relatively little of this work has been directed to developing indicators to address salient environmental policy questions in the United States.
|
From page 96... ...
. Evaluation of environmental policies is a necessary step to improving policy effectiveness.
|
From page 97... ...
Evaluation allows policy makers to learn from experience: to identify the lessons of public and private experience developing and implementing environmental policy and to use these lessons to make policies more effective. Despite the substantial potential value of rigorous evaluations of environmental policies, such ex post efforts are relatively rare (see Appendix D)
|
From page 98... ...
Finally, there is the potential for evaluation research to be used to justify or delegitimate existing policies according to a government's political agenda. This potential underlines the importance of establishing effective quality control and review procedures for environmental policy evaluations.
|
From page 99... ...
. Informal rules allow regulators leeway in how they interpret environmental laws.
|
From page 100... ...
Determining such causal relationships requires sophisticated understanding of how best to design research, utilize available data and overcome data gaps, and identify appropriate comparison groups. A concerted research effort on environmental policy evaluation will lead researchers to address these methodological challenges and advance the field.
|
From page 101... ...
, can be used to study trends in regulatory compliance and the relationships between compliance and interventions, such as facility inspections, technical assistance, and introduction of a voluntary program. These data could also be used to test the effects on compliance of environmental programs initiated by business, such as ISO 14001, the international environmental management standard, and responsible care.
|
From page 102... ...
Improved data in such areas would strengthen researchers' capabilities to do sound evaluations. Environmental policy evaluation can make a difference in policy by distinguishing promising policy approaches from those that are unlikely to lead to substantial advances.
|
From page 103... ...
These barriers to use are not insurmountable, however. In summary, environmental program evaluation is critical for improving the effectiveness of public and private environmental policies, and the need for measures of policy results has been recognized at the highest levels of the federal government.
|
From page 104... ...
Among them are the desires to increase the available lead time until decisions must be made to allow more careful analysis of various options and associated outcomes and to increase the chance for broad public participation in decision making. Short lead times make for poorly considered decisions and limit potential participation (Anderson, 1997)
|
From page 105... ...
Forecasting efforts could be improved by focusing from the start on the human setting of environmental decision making, which should be the starting point and the framework within which past trends and possible futures are forecast. Forecasting efforts should encompass human influences on the environment as well as biophysical processes.
|
From page 106... ...
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, 1995)
|
From page 107... ...
Rationale for the Activity The demand for environmental forecasts from public policy makers is evident in their continued reference to expected futures as providing the rationale for policy. The question is whether this field is ready to make significant scientific progress.
|
From page 108... ...
. Much of the recent literature on environmental inequity and injustice consists of activism and advocacy, analysis of the legal and civil rights aspects of environmental justice, and theoretical discussions of the meaning of equity (Bowen, 2001, 2002; English, 2004; Liu, 2001; Szasz and Meuser, 1997)
|
From page 109... ...
Four research themes seem most promising for addressing such questions. Areas of Research Defining Key Variables Executive Order 12898 requires each federal agency to "make achieving environmental justice part of its mission," defines that mission with reference to adverse effects on "minority populations and low-incom ity can make a significant contribution to defining and measuring these concepts, taking into account changes in definitions over time and across space (e.g., the contextual nature of the terms)
|
From page 110... ...
Consequently, efforts to build the models will engage a broad cross-section of researchers with critical issues in developing indicators, improving the quantity and quality of georeferenced data, and considering issues of scale dependence. Improving Visualization and Risk Communication Many distributional impacts and equity considerations are inherently geographical and readily displayed using maps.
|
From page 111... ...
. Such tools need evaluation, of course, in terms of their ability to provide accurate information about the distribution of environmental impacts, their value in generating ideas about how to reduce inequities, and their accessibility to the various populations concerned with environmental justice issues.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.