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INTEGRATING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL ANALYSIS TO IMPROVE WILDFIRE MANAGEMENT IN THE U.S.: TESTING A NEW ORGANIZING APPROACH FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT
Citation:
BRUINS, R. J., S. BOTTI, S. BRINK, D. CLELAND, L. KAPUSTKA, D. LEE, V. LUZADIS, W. R. MUNNS, JR., N. RANA, D. RIDEOUT, M. ROLLINS, P. WOODBURY, AND M. ZUPKO. INTEGRATING SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND ECOLOGICAL ANALYSIS TO IMPROVE WILDFIRE MANAGEMENT IN THE U.S.: TESTING A NEW ORGANIZING APPROACH FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT. Presented at U.S. Society for Ecological Economics, New York, NY, June 23 - 27, 2007.
Impact/Purpose:
The goal of this research is to develop methods and indicators that are useful for evaluating the condition of aquatic communities, for assessing the restoration of aquatic communities in response to mitigation and best management practices, and for determining the exposure of aquatic communities to different classes of stressors (i.e., pesticides, sedimentation, habitat alteration).
Description:
Conducting an integrated analysis to evaluate the societal and ecological consequences of environmental management actions requires decisions about data collection, theory development, modeling and valuation. Approaching these decisions in coordinated fashion necessitates a systematic planning process to (a) examine the nature of the environmental problem, data needs, analytical methods and decision-makers' requirements and (b) formulate an assessment approach. We describe a new, eight-step procedure for "integrated problem formulation" (IPF); this procedure brings together stakeholders and experts to examine context, values, objectives, alternatives, assessment endpoints, valuation, decision-support and effectiveness measures. We tested IPF in a workshop that examined the following problem: "How should limited public resources be allocated to minimize the risks to social welfare posed by wildfires in the U.S.?" We found that IPF broadened our understanding of the problem's scope and efficiently characterized the strengths and limitations of current wildfire management approaches. It also highlighted the importance of including experts from the decision sciences at the outset of an assessment process.