Improving decision making processes for adaptive environmental risk management

Ohio State University Research Foundation -Do Not Use, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

During the process of risk management, individuals as well as groups learn over time from their successes and also their failures. The principle of adaptive management is built on this concept; it directly addresses the objective of learning over time through the design, implementation, and monitoring of management "experiments." Learning, therefore, takes place through the analysis of multiple contrasting treatments, some of which succeed while others inevitably fail. In fact, failure in adaptive management is re-coded as success to the extent that it provides opportunities for learning, reducing uncertainty, and improving future outcomes. Yet herein lies the significant barrier to the implementation of adaptive management. Despite its common-sense appeal and agreement among scientists about its usefulness for managing complex environmental risks, the notion of "successful failures" has served as an institutional, political, and emotional barrier, effectively relegating adaptive management approaches to the status of principles that seem sound in theory but also socially unacceptable and politically impractical. Among the common reasons cited by ecologists and biologists for this history of implementation failures are four major classes of problems: difficulties faced by agencies when undertaking a long-run view (e.g., assisting institutional or political agencies to deal with intertemporal analyses), difficulties in establishing outcomes (e.g., separating experimental from external influences), difficulties in identifying and quantifying the predicted benefits of an adaptive approach (e.g., avoiding catastrophic surprises), and difficulties in balancing uncertain successes with inevitable failures. These are difficulties about which the decision sciences should have much to say. However, previous research has largely ignored the question of how these problems could be addressed-and, in turn, how the adaptive management paradigm could best be implemented-in the context of stakeholder-based environmental management processes. This research will apply the tools of the decision sciences to explore the consideration of adaptive management initiatives for environmental risk management; our work aims to: (1) develop and test a decision aiding approach that encourages value-based tradeoffs related to learning through adaptive management and (2) understand how people make use of affective heuristics when evaluating the suitability of adaptive management options for different classes of environmental problems. To address these objectives, two closely related lines of research are proposed. One involves developing and testing structured decision making approaches for adaptive management. The second element involves experiments designed to learn about integrating affective considerations and deliberation when evaluating adaptive management options. The broader impacts of the proposed research lie in the development of improved approaches for balancing the pros and cons of environmental management options across multiple ecological, economic, and political/cultural choices. These approaches should lead to stronger ties between the decision and natural sciences by linking technical analysis to structured discourse for complex environmental risk management problems.