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A new process for organizing assessments of social, economic and environmental outcomes: case study of wildland fire management in the U.S.A.
Citation:
BRUINS, R. J., W. R. MUNNS, JR., S. J. Biotti, S. Brink, D. Cleland, L. Kapustka, D. Lee, V. Luzadis, L. F. McCarthy, N. Rana, D. B. Rideout, M. Rollins, P. Woodbury, AND M. Zupko. A new process for organizing assessments of social, economic and environmental outcomes: case study of wildland fire management in the U.S.A. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management. Allen Press, Inc., Lawrence, KS, 6(3):469-483, (2010).
Impact/Purpose:
In this paper we describe a process that we term integrated problem formulation (IPF). IPF combines the planning and problem formulation processes and expands them as needed to meet the demands of integrated assessment. We present a set of eight quesitons that guide IPF, and we illustrate their use by means of a case study. We believe that this procedure will be useful as a front-end process for organizing integrated assessments in various environmental decision settings, and that it will benefit from further use and refinement.
Description:
Ecological risk assessments typically are organized using the processes of planning (a discussion among managers, stakeholders and analysis to clarify ecosystem management goals and assessment scope) and problem formulation (evaluation of existing information to generate hypotheses about adverse ecological effects, select assessment endpoints, and develop an analysis plan). These processes require modification to be applicable for integrated assessments that evaluate ecosystem management alternatives in terms of their ecological, economic and social consequences. We present eight questions that define the steps of a new process we term integrated problem formulation (IPF), and we ilustrate the use of IPF through a retrospective case study comparing two recent phases of development of the Fire Program Analysis (FPA) system, a planning and budgeting system for the management of wildland fire throughout publicly-managed lands in the United States.