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New Interoperable Tools to Facilitate Decision-Making to Support Community Sustainability
Citation:
SMITH, E. R., A. C. NEALE, R. C. Ziegler, AND L. E. Jackson. New Interoperable Tools to Facilitate Decision-Making to Support Community Sustainability. Chapter 14, Mueller, M:, Tippins D.J., Stewart A.J. (ed.), Assessing Schools for Generation R. Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 41:201-214, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
Although every decision is based on some form of a decision analysis, a true decision analysis (hereafter, decision analysis) attempts to consider all of the important factors. A decision analysis is a complex process and is often not done effectively, or at all, due to a lack of information, a traditional tendency to make decisions in a stove-piped fashion rather than considering the entire system, inadequate representation of all the factors that contribute to desired goals, and the absence of a transparent process for structuring and assessing the decision objectives. Communities’ decision processes vary by specific decision, community culture, the individual decision-maker, the ability to synthesize available information that could be used to inform the decision, and the degree of understanding of the linkages between actions and changes in community environmental, economic, and social health and well-being.
Description:
Communities, regional planning authorities, regulatory agencies, and other decision-making bodies do not currently have adequate access to spatially explicit information crucial to making decisions that allow them to consider a full accounting of the costs, benefits, and trade-offs of alternative decisions. Decisions made at multiple scales (ranging from communities to States to regions to national policies and regulations) impact quality of life at the community scale. Decisions are also influenced at multiple scales; individuals write letters and get involved, the media influences the public, science informs the public and policy-makers, voters influence politicians and therefore policy-makers and regulators (figure 1). Better information is needed to support decision analysis at all of these scales -- information that characterizes: the variations in biophysical characteristics that predispose communities towards a particular response to changes in conditions; the distribution of stressors that affect community sustainability; the distribution of both vulnerable resources and populations, and; the opportunities for multiple benefits or unintended consequences associated with management actions.
URLs/Downloads:
978-94-007-2747-2#
SMITH 11-044 BOOK CHAPTER DRAFT V2.PDF (PDF, NA pp, 672 KB, about PDF)