Western Rock Lobster Fishery - Ecological risk assessment 2005 report.

The first two parts of the document provide background on the western rock lobster fishery and its governance. The third and fourth parts outline reporting requirements for the Ecologically Sustainable Development process and the specifics of the risk assessment process applied here. These sections are based substantially on reports written earlier by the Department of Fisheries and distributed to participants in the risk assessment process. They have been edited here to include only the details that were pertinent to this risk assessment. Parts 5, 6 and 7 provide the outcomes of the hazard elicitation workshop with stakeholders and the subsequent risk assessments conducted by the experts

The civil service doesn't just need more scientists - it needs a decision-making revolution

In the UK, the election of a new government has seen a renewed focus on research policy and the use of evidence in policymaking. In this repost, David Rose, Mark Burgman and William Sutherland, draw on their experiecnces of working within different government departments, to consider how evidence is currently used by the civil service and to set out an agenda for how evidence and experts could be better integrated into high level decision making

ODNI as an analytic ombudsman: is Intelligence Community Directive 203 up to the task?

In the wake of 9/11 and the assessment of Iraq's WMD, several inquiries placed the blame primarily on the Intelligence Community. Part of the reform that followed was a codification of analytic tradecraft standards into Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 203 and the appointment of an analytic ombudsman in the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence charged with monitoring the quality of analytic products from across the intelligence community. In this paper we identify three assumptions behind ICD203: (1) tradecraft standards can be employed consistently; (2) tradecraft standards sufficiently capture the key elements of good reasoning; (3) good reasoning leads to more accurate judgments. We then report on two controlled experiments that uncover operational constraints in the reliable application of the ICD203 criteria for the assessment of intelligence products. Despite criticisms of the post-9/11 and post-Iraq reform, our results highlight that ICD203, properly applied, holds potential to improve precision and accountability of intelligence processes and products

Incorporating collateral information using an adaptive management framework for the regulation of transgenic crops:

"A lack of data often makes biological management decisions difficult and has been an area of contention in the debate over the approval of transgenic crops. Our knowledge of agricultural and natural systems is limited and our ability to gain additional information, quickly and effectively, is often handicapped by statistical complexity. To adequately cope with this requires new approaches and models that integrate decision-making and management. This paper describes one possible approach to the integration of decision-making and management, which may have application for the regulatory approval of transgenic crops. In many situations countries wishing to approve transgenic crops will have limited data on the environmental performance of the crop. The approach outlined in this paper looks at how related information, possibly collected from other countries, might be used to help inform decisions about the approval of transgenic crops. This is done within an integrated decision-making and management framework." Authors' AbstractTransgenic plants, Collateral data, Bayesian theory, Inference,

Eliciting Model Structures for Multivariate Probabilistic Risk Analysis

Notionally objective probabilistic risk models, built around ideas of cause and effect, are used to predict impacts and evaluate trade-offs. In this paper, we focus on the use of expert judgement to fill gaps left by insufficient data and understanding. Psychological and contextual phenomena such as anchoring, availability bias, confirmation bias and overconfidence are pervasive and have powerful effects on individual judgements. Research across a range of fields has found that groups have access to more diverse information and ways of thinking about problems, and routinely outperform credentialled individuals on judgement and prediction tasks. In structured group elicitation, individuals make initial independent judgements, opinions are respected, participants consider the judgements made by others, and they may have the opportunity to reconsider and revise their initial estimates. Estimates may be aggregated using behavioural, mathematical or combined approaches. In contrast, mathematical modelers have been slower to accept that the host of psychological frailties and contextual biases that afflict judgements about parameters and events may also influence model assumptions and structures. Few, if any, quantitative risk analyses embrace sources of uncertainty comprehensively. However, several recent innovations aim to anticipate behavioural and social biases in model construction and to mitigate their effects. In this paper, we outline approaches to eliciting and combining alternative ideas of cause and effect. We discuss the translation of ideas into equations and assumptions, assessing the potential for psychological and social factors to affect the construction of models. We outline the strengths and weaknesses of recent advances in structured, group-based model construction that may accommodate a variety of understandings about cause and effect

Treatment of uncertainty in conservation under climate change

Climate change is an important threat to biodiversity globally, but there are major uncertainties associated with its magnitude and ecological consequences. Here, we investigate how three major classes of uncertainty, linguistic uncertainty, epistemic uncertainty (uncertainty about facts) and human decision uncertainty, have been accounted for in scientific literature about climate change. Some sources of uncertainty are poorly characterized and epistemic uncertainty is much more commonly treated than linguistic or human decision uncertainty. Furthermore, we show that linguistic and human decision uncertainties are relatively better treated in the literature on socio-politics or economics than in natural sciences, which often overlook communication between stakeholders and socio-economic consequences. As uncertainty can significantly influence implementation of conservation, we discuss uncertainties associated with some commonly proposed conservation adaptation actions to mitigate climate change. There may be major differences between strategies, with implications on how they should be viewed in conservation planning. We conclude that evaluating conservation strategies in terms of different types of uncertainty will facilitate communication between disciplines and stakeholders. While accounting for uncertainties in a quantitative manner is difficult and data-demanding, even qualitative appreciation about the uncertainties inherent in conservation strategies can facilitate and improve decision making.Peer reviewe

Limits To The Use Of Threatened Species Lists

Threatened species lists are designed primarily to provide an easily understood qualitative estimate of risk of extinction. Although these estimates of risk can be accurate, the lists have inevitably become linked to several decision-making processes. There are four ways in which such lists are commonly used: to set priorities for resource allocation for species recovery; to inform reserve system design; to constrain development and exploitation; and to report on the state of the environment. The lists were not designed for any one of these purposes, and consequently perform some of them poorly. We discuss why, if and how they should be used to achieve these purposes