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RESTORING WILD SALMON TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: FRAMING THE RISK QUESTION
Citation:
Lackey, R T. RESTORING WILD SALMON TO THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST: FRAMING THE RISK QUESTION. Presented at Society for Risk Analysis 2001 annual meeting, Seattle, WA, December 2-5, 2001.
Description:
In western North America, it is urgent to assess accurately the various options proposed to protect or restore wild salmon. For the past 125 years, a variety of analytic approaches have been employed to assess the ecological consequences of salmon management options. Each approach provided useful information to decision makers, but each also suffered from limitations, some relatively minor, others sufficient to undermine any potential utility. Risk assessment has become the most widely used analytic approach to evaluate environmental policy options. To date its application in ecological policy has been largely constrained to evaluating relatively simple technical questions (e.g., regulatory actions associated with specific chemicals or hazardous waste sites). Recently, however, there has been interest in applying risk assessment to more complex ecological policy problems (e.g., the decline of wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest). Although its use has become commonplace, especially among regulatory and land management agencies, risk assessment remains contentious. The most heated debates revolve around delineating the specification of the adverse event; that is, framing the risk "question" to be answered. As a decision support tool, risk assessment can provide useful input into the decision making process, but its contribution is limited by the requirement of up-front, specific, and narrowly defined risk questions. As for the future of wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest, a societal consensus on an explicit and realistic restoration policy objective remains elusive, and will likely remain so. Given such a nebulous, yet realistic, public policy context, risk assessment can still provide helpful, although limited, information to decision makers. To the extent that ecological risk assessment encourages a focus on fundamental salmon policy issues rather than superficial technical or scientific ones, it will be most useful to society. Otherwise, it is merely the latest in a procession of analytical tools, each of which has a role, albeit limited, in ecological policy analysis.