Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
too fixed this could hamper a flexible adaptation to the IA process. A totally flexible
selection of indicators is not possible to achieve. Our suggestion for an indicator
framework was seen as a useful compromise (Alkan Olsson et al.
2009)
.
Concluding Remark on the UF Experience
The interactions with the potential users in the Commission served the development
process of SEAMLESS-IF with specifications of requirements and the development of
a strategy for maintenance beyond the project's lifetime. It led to the identification
of the need for different user interfaces and the possibility to adopt these according
to procedural requirements in the EC's assessment work. Clearly, the degrees of
freedom in a large research project with many partners with a funding agency that
requests a clear and detailed project proposal before starting the project are somehow
restricted once the projected has started. The interactions however confirmed from
the outset that what was proposed and developed by the SEAMLESS project was
matching their overall needs. Within the overall aims and methodology the interactions
assisted in priority setting within the project and greatly triggered the timely thinking
about continuity, maintenance, extension and dissemination. In this way, the two
main results of the interactions, i.e. evaluation and specification of requirements
and continuity, also serve each other. Requirements which cannot be satisfied
(entirely) during the lifetime of the project are an important starting point for the
work plan of the SEAMLESS Association.
Case: Interacting with Regional Organisations
The application cases are derived from the testing stage of SEAMLESS-IF prototype 2,
involving
modellers
from the project with knowledge about database structures,
data formats, quality measures and model components and
policy experts
representing
political or administrative bodies in France.
The testing of the
pre-modelling
phase included selecting and framing of the
issue at stake for the organisation involved as well as defining the policy measures
to be tested and the experiments to assess these measures.
Framing the issue
included specifying the ultimate and intermediate goals of the policy to be tested
in terms of impact indicators.
Defining potential measures
to be tested involved
specification of changes in the environment of the target actors of the policy
(economic instruments, regulation instruments, voluntary instruments) and/or changes
in the behaviour of given actors.
Designing experiments
involved defining the
spatial scale of the issue at stake (EU, nation, region, farm-type, etc.), the temporal
scale of the implementation of the measures, and the driving forces of the future not
handled by the tested policy and that might influence the outcome (alternative
economic and/or environmental scenarios).
Two different methods for interaction were applied: open discussions around key
topics and discussions structured around templates to be filled in during the meeting.
