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Connecting environmental futures with environmental decision-making
Citation:
Gibbs, D. AND J. Flotemersch. Connecting environmental futures with environmental decision-making. 2018 AGU Fall Meeting, Washington, D.C, December 10 - 14, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
This product was created to support the enhancement of the U.S. EPA Report on the Environment and to also support other programs seeking to initiate environmental futures programs.
Description:
The development of environmental decisions and policies must contend with significant uncertainty about the future, which can hinder the decision-making process. To help surmount this, a variety of indicator- and non-indicator-based tools to explore potential environmental futures and associated uncertainties have been developed. Even when environmental futures efforts do not capture what eventually occurs, the exercise of producing them can nevertheless benefit its undertakers through its emphasis on comprehensively understanding systems and expanding thinking beyond “business as usual”. We review environmental and non-environmental programs that use indicators to inform environmental futures for decision- and policy-making. The two objectives of this review are to: 1) identify and discuss key attributes of environmental futures programs using several examples, and 2) propose attributes of environmental futures programs that might promote their successful uptake in decision processes. Attributes of environmental futures programs discussed include purpose and audience, methods, handling of uncertainty and assumptions, relationship to indicator programs, how program values and biases are addressed, the role of goals, and how programs measure success. We conclude with seven recommendations for how environmental futures can becreated for successful integration into environmental decisions. These include: combining multiple environmental futures methods to provide complementary insights or highlight inconsistencies in assumptions, include some schematic of assumptions and drivers, and define success criteria and evaluate success, whenever possible. These can help increase the acceptance of environmental futures products in decisions and increase their short-term and long-term contributions.
