Current thinking on using scientific findings in environmental policy making

This paper provides an overview of current thinking about the use of scientific findings in policy making about environmental issues. As Funtowicz and Ravetz [14] have pointed out, issues of global environmental change differ from “traditional scientific problems”, because they are global in scale and have long-term impacts, data are generally inadequate and the phenomena are complex and not well understood. Decisions have to be made on the basis of uncertain inputs and under somewhat urgent conditions. As a result, in the case of environmental issues science plays a different role than it has done in policy making on other issues. Funtowicz and Ravetz pointed out that the limitations of traditional problem-solving strategies in dealing with global environmental risks arise because decisions depend on evaluations of future states of the natural environment, resources and human society, all of which are unknown and unknowable. They concluded that a new methodology is required for science to provide support for decisions on global environmental issues. This will require “extended peer communities”, because quality assurance requires participants outside the usual peer communities of experts. It also requires “extended facts”, such as evidence that is initially anecdotal or information not usually available to the public. Thus we see that in the environment area, we appear to be confronted with a special case, as far as the use of scientific information in policy making is concerned. Section 2 of this paper looks at some examples of the way in which the interactions of the science and policy worlds have been characterized. It shows that the simple and often used model that first the science is done and then the policy is formulated and implemented is not valid. Section 3 reviews some general conclusions about the design and use of integrated environmental assessment within the context of the use of scientific findings in policy making. A number of scholars have provided checklists of issues or practices to bear in mind in the design of assessments and others have looked at the advantages of the two main assessment practices – formal models and expert panels. Section 4 describes reported experience in using either integrated assessment models or integrated assessments in policy making for