Decision Making for the Environment Social and Behavioral Science Research Priorities (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-10
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From page 1... ...
The National Academies were asked to focus primarily on the social and behavioral sciences other than economics, because they have not received much attention from environmental decision-making organizations, and to recommend research areas that scored well on three criteria: the likelihood of achieving significant scientific advances, the potential value of the expected knowledge for improving decisions that have important environmental implications, and the likelihood that the research would be used to improve those decisions. We were also asked to consider recommending ways to overcome barriers to the use of research that would have high priority if such barriers could be overcome and invited to make general recommendations for infrastructure that could increase the likelihood that the recommended knowledge across 1
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We recommend five science priorities that strongly meet the decision criteria. IMPROVING ENVIRONMENTAL DECISION PROCESSES Federal agencies should support a program of research in the decision sciences addressed to improving the analytical tools and deliberative processes necessary for good environmental decision making.
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The recommended research would advance understanding of the characteristics of good decisions, further develop decision science tools for practical uses, and advance theoretical and practical understanding of ways to inform decisions through analytic deliberation. It would offer scientific guidance to the growing numbers of federal agencies and others who are opening environmental decision making to a range of stakeholders and affected parties as to how best to make these processes serve societal goals.
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This research priority, which has been identified in several previous National Research Council reports, would bring together two separate research traditions on environmental governance. It would elaborate a conceptual framework and supporting bodies of knowledge that environmental policy makers, natural resource managers, and other participants in environmental governance could use to improve resource management institutions and to design more effective linkages among institutions at different levels of governance.
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ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR Federal agencies should support a concerted research effort to better understand and inform environmentally significant decisions by individuals. Because the activities of individuals and households have major environmental consequences in the aggregate, considerable environmental improvement can in principle result from change in their behavior.
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The recommended research will inform decision makers at various levels who want to understand and anticipate changes in environmentally significant individual behavior or to use information and other policy tools to promote socially desired environmentally significant behavior. It is also likely to lead to practical understanding relevant to other areas of policy and to better fundamental understanding of individual behavior under complex real-world conditions and of the determinants of environmental resource consumption.
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From page 7... ...
This science priority would enable federal agencies to greatly improve the infrastructure of scientific information and methods toward the goal of informing practical decisions. The recommended scientific activities would integrate the social sciences and the natural sciences of the environment and would address both environmental conditions and their human connections.
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Federal environmental agencies should undertake an assortment of research initiatives to collect, appraise, develop, and extend analytic activities related to forecasting in order to improve environmental understanding and decision making. As with the development of indicators, forecasting efforts should focus from the start on the human setting of environmental decision making, should encompass human influences on the environment as well as biophysical processes, and should be directed at decision-relevant outcomes, including environmental, health, and socioeconomic outcomes and the distribution of these outcomes across segments of the population.
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From page 9... ...
Research to develop the scientific foundation for evidence-based environmental policy would enable major advances in fundamental understanding of the dynamics of human-environment interaction by vastly increasing the possibility of analyzing these relationships quantitatively. It would also greatly increase the decision relevance of environmental analyses by providing credible measures and methods of analysis for addressing issues of critical concern to both decision makers and scientists.
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