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

Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making: A Handbook of Research and Best Practice presents the state of the art in applying operations research and management science (OR/MS) techniques to a broad range of environmental decision making (EDM) challenges. Drawing on leading researchers in the field, it provides a guided tour of selected methods and tools to help deal with issues as climate change, depleting biodiversity and biocapacity, and more general atmospheric, water and soil pollution problems. Individual peer-reviewed chapters look at applying stochastic reasoning on difficult issues arising in EDM under uncertainty; applying stochastic or robust programming methods to techno-economic modeling of energy/environment interactions; important consequences of uncertainty inherent in weather patterns, the El Nino phenomenon and anticipated climate change; exploiting tools of decision analysis, utility theory and optimal control theory to account for differences in time scales between human development processes and the natural processes of the biosphere; and methods that combine statistical and decision analyses that can support a variety of environmental management problems.

This important new work will be of special interest to a wide range of researchers, students, and practitioners in environmental economics, OR/MS, environmental and earth sciences, climatologists, and risk assessment.

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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