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Using structured decision making-stakeholder engagement to integrate community values with scientific understanding for better decision-making.
Citation:
Canfield, Timothy J., B. Dyson, T. Richardson, AND J. Carriger. Using structured decision making-stakeholder engagement to integrate community values with scientific understanding for better decision-making. SETAC North America, 40th Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, CANADA, November 03 - 07, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
With the creation of the USEPA, rapid progress was made to address and fix the most egregious and readily tractable environmental pollution problems. While it made sense to address these ‘low hanging fruit” problems, in the background were many less easily defined (i.e. “wicked”) problems that needed addressing. Such problems were not readily solved by technical solutions and regulations alone due to inter-related socio-economic and environmental constraints. The multi-disciplinary nature of such problems necessitates methods and means to include community stakeholder values to inform management objectives and performance metrics, combined with technical/scientific expertise for integrated assessment and evaluation of proposed solutions. DASEES (Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society) is a web-based tool predicated on the precepts of decision analysis, aimed at enabling users to better formulate, assess, evaluate, and communicate issues, solution results and tradeoffs to address complex problems. This talk will demonstrate how the EPA Developed DASEES tool works and how researcher can use this values-focused structured decision making approach to engage community stakeholders to identify objectives, measures of success and options to address these “wicked” problems faced by these communities.
Description:
By the early 1970’s, the state of the environment in the United States had been degraded to the point that the public was raising greater concerns about litter and debris, contaminated waters, beach closures, rivers catching on fire, and deteriorating air quality to their elected officials demanding something be done to address these very visible environmental problems. With the creation of the USEPA, rapid progress was made to address and fix the most egregious and readily tractable environmental pollution problems. While it made sense to address these ‘low hanging fruit” problems, in the background were many less easily defined (i.e. “wicked”) problems that needed addressing. Such problems were not readily solved by technical solutions and regulations alone due to inter-related socio-economic and environmental constraints. The multi-disciplinary nature of such problems necessitates methods and means to include community stakeholder values to inform management objectives and performance metrics, combined with technical/scientific expertise for integrated assessment and evaluation of proposed solutions. DASEES (Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society) is a web-based tool predicated on the precepts of decision analysis, aimed at enabling users to better formulate, assess, evaluate, and communicate issues, solution results and tradeoffs to address complex problems. The DASEES user-interface provides a suite of tools for structuring and analyzing environmental management problems, that are accessible and understandable to a broad range of stakeholder expertise. DASEES is designed to capture stakeholder provided information and integrate scientific data and expertise, in a transparent and inclusive approach to develop and evaluate solutions. Alternative evaluation, (the stakeholder-derived valuation of data/science-driven metric assessments), is presented through 1) Consequence Tables suitable for more rapid screening evaluations where there is minimal uncertainty, and 2) Bayesian network evaluations where there may be more uncertainty and/or a need to better characterize important socio-ecologic causal linkages to metrics.