Decision analytics offer powerful tools to support environmental management decisions, especially regarding the following steps: 1) structuring the environmental management objectives to ensure the inclusion of all important decision criteria and to facilitate analysis by hierarchical structuring; 2) the development of standardized assessment procedures to assess the ecological state/ecosystem integrity; 3) the elicitation and representation of (inter-)subjective preferences regarding the trade-offs with other societal objectives, e.g. ecosystem services, which are usually case specific and differ between stakeholders; 4) a quantification and propagation of uncertainty (especially regarding the consequences of management alternatives) to analyze the robustness of the evaluation of different management alternatives; 5) facilitation of exchange between stakeholders with conflicting preferences through a mutual learning process and the identification of compromise solutions.
While there is a large variety of decision analytical methods available, we introduced a framework based on the multi-attribute value and utility theory (Reichert et al., 2015), that ensures the fulfillment of basic axioms of rationality while offering a large flexibility regarding the representation of preferences. This is important because 1) environmental management decisions need to be justifiable to the public and 2) it is not adequate to describe trade-offs between complementary ecological objectives with an additive aggregation (weighted arithmetic mean) that implies that objectives are compensatory, as it is done in many other decision support methods. We introduced different aggregation functions to quantify trade-offs between objectives, explain their properties and give recommendation on their choice in typical situations (Langhans, Reichert & Schuwirth, 2014).
Results/Conclusions
We applied the decision support framework for the development of assessment procedures to evaluate the ecological state of Swiss rivers, to quantify success of river rehabilitation measures, for strategic river rehabilitation planning, and for integrative water quality management. I will illustrate the framework based on one of these studies and give recommendations for its application.
Langhans S.D., Reichert P. & Schuwirth N. (2014) The method matters: A guide for indicator aggregation in ecological assessments. Ecological Indicators, 45, 494-507.
Reichert P., Langhans S.D., Lienert J. & Schuwirth N. (2015) The conceptual foundation of environmental decision support. Journal of Environmental Management, 154, 316-332.