Representing Human Decision-Making in Environmental Modelling - Environmental Modelling: Finding Simplicity in Complexity - page 279

18

Representing Human
Decision-Making in
Environmental Modelling

James D.A. Millington 1 , John Wainwright 2 and Mark Mulligan 1
1 Department of Geography, King's College London, UK
2 Department of Geography, Durham University, UK

2007b). Modelling of human decision-making is now a
central element of many attempts to assess the nature
and extent of environmental change and to establish
appropriate management actions.
Now, this justification for some representation of
human activity in many environmental models (hope-
fully!) seems very logical and sensible, and one could
argue that much human decision-making is also very logi-
cal and sensible. But the logic we use to make our decisions
often varies between individuals or over time depending
on mood in a particular individual or the experience of
their life; sometimes it is flawed, and sometimes it may
be absent altogether (or seemingly so to others at least).
Sometimes the logic is biased through motives of personal
gain or political influence. And when multiple decisions
(potentially using different logical foundations) are nego-
tiated and interact through time, over space, or up and
down a hierarchy of power, they result in a complex system
that can be difficult to forecast, predict or understand.
For example, the production of this topic is a complex
system. It is made up of a series of interconnecting parts
with inputs from a large number of external sources - the
experiences of the contributing authors. These experi-
ences combine to provide a whole that can function in a
number of ways - as a manual, a reference, and a source
of ideas. The way in which it is put together provides
one means of using (reading) it, but as noted in the
introduction, you needn't have found this chapter about

18.1 Introduction

It has been argued that we have now entered the Anthro-
pocene (Crutzen, 2002; Wilkinson, 2005; Steffen et al .,
2007), an era in which human activity dominates many
environmental and ecological systems on Earth. 1 For
example, Hooke (2000) has demonstrated that human
activity has overtaken rivers as the principal transport
agent for sediment. Human land use is now global in
extent and threatens the capacity of ecosystems to ensure
freshwater supplies, maintain forest resources and regu-
late atmospheric composition and air quality (Foley et al .,
2005). Human-induced climate change has the potential
to drive many environmental changes globally (IPCC,
2007). However, the relationship between humans and
the environment is not solely a story of human domi-
nation. Reciprocal interactions between environmental
processes and human activity give rise to nonlinear
dynamics, threshold effects and potentially surprising
system behaviour, leaving many questions open about
how humans should act to manage and sustain ecosystem
services (e.g., Kremen and Ostfeld, 2005; Liu et al ., 2007a;

1 We will leave aside the debate about whether humans are part of
the environment or 'nature' - see Phillips and Mighall, (2000) for
discussions