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ECONOMICS AND DECISION SCIENCES MULTI-YEAR PLAN
Citation:
Impact/Purpose:
The Office of Research and Development (ORD) has initiated a multi-year planning effort to plan the direction of our research program in selected topic areas over five or more years. This approach promotes ORD's focus on the highest priority issues and provides coordination for achieving our long-term research goals. The focus of this effort is the development of Multi-Year Plans (MYPs).
The purpose of the MYPs is to provide a framework that integrates research across ORD's laboratories and centers and Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) goals in support of the Agency's mission to protect human health and the environment. The MYPs identify long-term goals, and present annual performance goals (APGs) and associated annual performance measures (APMs) for a planning window of approximately 5-10 years. By helping to identify the impact of potential annual planning decisions, MYPs aid in the evaluation of research options. MYPs also foster the integration of strategic risk-based environmental protection and anticipation of future environmental issues by communicating our research approach and timing for responding to environmental issues. MYPs are intended to be living documents and are updated as needed to reflect the current state of the science, resource availability, and Agency priorities.
MYPs include two major components: (1) a narrative description of the plan, and (2) a matrix of goals and measures. The narrative provides an introduction and background to the topic of the plan, describes the long-term goals, provides the logic/thinking used to array performance goals to achieve long-term goals, and describes the integration between goals and organizations. The matrix is used to indicate annual goals and measures needed to meet the long-term goals identified in the plan. These goals and measures are arrayed across time (i.e., fiscal years) and laboratories/centers and are based on total annual resource levels for the MYP topic area that will not exceed the resource level proposed in the most recent President's Budget.
Description:
As long as environmental policy is designed to change behaviors that cause environmental problems, economics and decision sciences research will be essential to understanding these behaviors. In addition, this research informs state and federal environmental agencies on how best and most cost-effectively to accomplish three overarching responsibilities: (1) anticipating, identifying, and setting priorities for managing environmental problems to protect ecological and human health; (2) developing policies to address the selected environmental priorities; and (3) implementing the policies to achieve better environmental outcomes. Under its multi-year plan for economics and decision sciences, EPA has established five long-term goals for economics and decision sciences research that focus on changing behaviors that cause environmental problems; developing tools to assess the highest priority issues based on public preferences; and developing implementation strategies that accurately account for behavioral responses to government initiatives and interventions. Within the scope of this MYP, EPA will: 1. Develop reliable and widely applicable or transferable approaches and estimates of values for ecological benefits and human health benefits, with particular emphases on children's health issues and benefit transfer methods. 2. Identify the motivations influencing the environmental behavior of corporations and other regulated entities in order to accurately predict responses to various government interventions, including enforcement, technical assistance, information dissemination and voluntary initiatives. 3. Identify responses to market mechanism and economic incentives and investigate how incentive programs can be designed to take advantage of predictable responses to incentives. 4. Develop reliable approaches to estimate the benefits and cost savings from disclosing environmental information about firms' or facilities' production processes, disposal practices, environmental releases, products and services.