Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making: A Handbook of Research and Best Practice

Environmental issues are at the center of much of today’s geopolitical problems and debate. We live in an era where many global policies, regulations, and business decisions are influenced by our interactions with the natural environment. Questions of how our decisions will impact the environment and, conversely, how the environment—which is constantly changing—will impact our decisions are becoming increasingly urgent. This is evidenced by the debate about the Kyoto Greenhouse Gas Emissions agreement; the concern about supplies of natural resources (yes indeed, the oil curse) and about the frequency and intensity of extreme events (hurricanes, etc.).

Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making will outline the challenging issues from a scientific point of view, while providing an understanding of the current underlying processes which make these issues so challenging and difficult. The chapter treatments will examine environmental problems and solutions by utilizing various OR methods and examining the varying degrees of uncertainty that characterize each problem. The result will be an especially timely "best practices" handbook that covers the following central themes:

Environmental decision making under uncertainty.

Application of OR methods to environmental management.

Modeling the salient characteristic of the uncertainty accompanying environmental models