Using a Bayesian Belief Network to Integrate Ecology, Economics and Social Sciences to Improve Policy Making: a Literature Review

Humans live in close relationship to the environment, which they directly and indirectly use and depend on for food resources, building materials, protection, relaxation, to mention but a few examples. Recent years have seen depletion of the health of many natural environments leading to a stronger focus on natural resource based management approaches. While in earlier decades management was driven by either purely ecological conservation or economic goals, more recently there is a greater awareness of the need to integrate ecological, social and economic factors into management decision-making (Gjertsen 2005; Ban, Adams et al. 2011). Related to this is an increasing body of research investigating how and to what degree social-wellbeing (or humanwellbeing) and ecosystem-health is related and how these should be considered in natural resource management. As yet, though, identifying a reliable mechanism to incorporate these three elements simultaneously into natural resource management and policy formation has proved difficult. The development of such a mechanism was the challenge undertaken in the Valuing Nature Network (VNN) Project “Interdisciplinary methods to build a socio-ecological decision-making tool to inform marine governance and policy”. This paper reviews available literature for the modelling framework adopted in that project Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs). We begin with an overview of ecosystem based management in the context of coastal environments and then consider decision support tools in general before focussing on the strengths and limitations of BBNs in particular.