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2. Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society (DASEES): A tool for better decision-making by integrating community values with scientific understanding
Citation:
Dyson, B., T. Canfield, T. Richardson, AND J. Carriger. 2. Decision Analysis for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society (DASEES): A tool for better decision-making by integrating community values with scientific understanding. 2019 Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting, Louisville, Kentucky, August 11 - 16, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
The US EPA’s Sustainable and Healthy Communities (SHC) National Research Program has provided $2 million research grants to fund four academic research projects through the Science-To-Achieve-Results(STAR) to carry out community-based research that will foster better understanding of how ecosystems and ecosystem services support human health and well-being, with the following major research questions: What are the factors that determine success or failure, when using existing data sources on environmental pollution, ecosystem services, and community health and well-being, to understand the impacts of multiple stressors? What are the factors that influence whether and how transparent decision-making processes are developed and used to identify the most important stakeholders and stressors, evaluate management strategies, and set and prioritize goals? What are the most effective methods for tracking progress and ensuring accountability towards mitigating and reducing adverse impacts to ecosystems and human health and wellbeing at the community level? In this session, the four research projects will examine how communities can promote human health and well-being in their decision makings and management practices regarding some of their most vitally important ecological systems: (1) how a community deals with the harmful algal blooms threatening its major lake, (2) how an agricultural community may make the most optimal land-use decisions for a holistic sustainability, (3) how a community nearby CAFO may utilize its natural ecological assets to promote its health and resilience, (4) how a community may make the most optimal near-term decisions regarding its ecology and human residents. A common goal of the projects is to develop scientific evidence—based tools, models, or approaches to better enable communities to integrate environmental, societal, and economic information for optimal outcomes. The four research presentations, along with two EPA’s SHC tools research presentations will attempt to integrate, synthesize, and generalize these different challenges into solutions for communities that can use for a variety of environmental/ecological problems. The main purposes of the symposium are: (1) to present compelling case studies and examples on how communities may make the most optimal decisions regarding its important ecology and human residents (2) to have open discussion with ESA members on how a community can bring about meaningful and impactful changes to bridge ecosystem and human health; and (3) to have open dialogue about how scientific research results can be applied to real-world issues in actual communities, narrowing the gap between theory and practice in achieving the optimal ecological health and human health.
Description:
Background/Question/Methods Following the passing of landmark environmental legislation and the establishment of the US EPA, rapid progress was made in addressing the most pressing and tractable environmental pollution problems through regulation and technological solutions. Less easily defined, “wicked” environmental management problems require integration and consideration of social, economic, and ecological dimensions affecting emerging goals such as ecological restoration, resilience, and human well-being. 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 is a web-based tool predicated on the precepts of decision analysis, aimed at enabling users to better formulate, assess, evaluate, and communicate tradeoffs for complex issues. The DASEES user-interface provides a suite of tools for structuring and analyzing environmental management problems amenable to a broad range of stakeholder expertise. The potential of DASEES to support the integration of social and ecological preferences for prioritized ecosystem restoration in the Puget Sound basin is demonstrated. Results/Conclusions How DASEES can integrate human well-being endpoints into the evaluation of management alternatives for Puget Sound watershed test groups will be demonstrated. DASEES provides tools to support structured inclusion of stakeholder values, objectives, relevant metrics and data, and models for evaluating stakeholder proposed solutions for ecosystem restoration. Alternative evaluation, (the stakeholder-derived valuation of data/science-driven metric assessments), can be implemented 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. These tools within DASEES provide a basis for understanding the tradeoffs and incorporating the concerns of stakeholders and decision makers interested in better inclusion of social and ecological data for resource management.