Building Science for Environmental Protection in the 21st Century - Science For Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead - page 95

EMBRACING SYSTEMS THINKING FOR PRODUCING AND
APPLYING SCIENCE FOR DECISIONS: A 21 ST CENTURY
FRAMEWORK FOR SCIENCE TO INFORM DECISIONS

The continued emergence of major new and complex challenges described
in Chapter 2—and the need to deal with the inevitable uncertainty that accom-
panies major environmental, technologic, and health issues—will necessitate a
new way to make decisions. As described in Chapter 3, systems thinking has
begun to take root in biology and other fields as a means of considering the
whole rather than the sum of its parts; this will be essential as increasingly com-
plex problems and the challenges described in Chapter 2 present themselves.
The emergence of “wicked problems”, the increasing need to address exposures
of humans and the ecosystem to multiple pollutants through multiple pathways
(some of which are global), and the continuing challenges for the analysis and
characterization of uncertainty throughout science and decision-making combine
to make the adoption of systems thinking critical.
The systems-thinking perspective is useful not only for characterizing
complex effects but for designing sustainable solutions, whether they are inno-
vative technologies or behavioral changes. Understanding systems is also impor-
tant for determining where leverage points exist for the prevention of health and
environmental effects (Meadows 1999). To successfully inform future environ-
mental protection decisions in an increasingly complex world, systems thinking
must, at a minimum, include consideration of cumulative effects of multiple
stressors, evaluation of a wide range of alternatives to the activity of concern,
analysis of the upstream and downstream life-cycle implications of current and
alternative activities, involvement of a broad range of stakeholders in decisions
(particularly where uncertainty is significant), and use of interdisciplinary scien-
tific approaches that characterize and communicate uncertainties as clearly as
possible. As part of a systems perspective, it will be important for the agency to
engage in “systems mapping” to comprehensively understand the way in which
interacting stressors (such as environmental, human, technologic, socioeco-
nomic, and political stressors) map to health and environmental impacts and to
identify where intervention points can result in primary prevention solutions.
Although EPA has made efforts over the years to attempt to bring systems
concepts into its work, most recently in its efforts to reorganize its activities
under a sustainability framework (Anastas 2012), these efforts have rarely been
integrated throughout the agency, nor sustained from one set of leaders to an-
other. To begin to address the lack of a sustained systems perspective, the com-
mittee has developed a 21st century framework for decisions (Figure 4-1) and
recommends a set of organizational changes to implement that framework (see
Chapter 5). The framework features four elements that will be critical for in-
forming the complex decisions that EPA faces:

 To stay at the leading edge, EPA science will need to

o Anticipate.