Making decisions on complex environmental problems

• Helen M. Regan
• Sahotra Sarkar

Abstract
Environmental scientists must often facilitate complex decision-making based on scientific data but subject to societal and other constraints on management options. Complexity arises from: (i) multiple, often incommensurable, criteria that must be incorporated into decisions; (ii) decisions that must reflect the often conflicting long- and short-term goals of multiple stakeholders; and (iii) decisions that must be made in the presence of risk and uncertainty. The purpose of this project is to characterize scenarios for environmental decision-making and develop a conceptual taxonomy of them; review existing methods for dealing with multiple criteria and objectives, multiple stakeholders, and risk and uncertainty; develop integrated protocols for the use of these methods for complex decision making scenarios in conservation, wildlife management and/or environmental science; develop software tools for some of the methods for which existing tools are inadequate; test protocols and tools against available data sets; and identify areas in which more research is needed.