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Recruit several new staff who have earned advanced degrees in em-
pirically-based behavioral and decision science. The new staff would need to
have strong communication skills and would need to work with economists,
natural scientists, and engineers in the agency to help to make regulatory and
other agency policies that promote environmentally protective behaviors and
that are more realistic. Their knowledge would assist the agency by helping it to
make more informed choices in seeking outside contractors and advisers and to
create stronger collaboration with academics in related fields. The committee
suggests that the new staff be located within NCEE. The reason for that sugges-
tion is that NCEE currently staffs the largest number of social scientists within
the agency. The large interest in behavioral and decision sciences that exists
now in economics broadly, as exhibited by the fields of behavioral and neu-
roeconomics, will contribute to making NCEE a productive location. More im-
portantly, behavioral economics is an essential source of new insight in envi-
ronmental economics research pertaining to the benefits of environmental
protection and the design of incentives for environmental management. Co-
locating behavioral scientists within NCEE will increase the capacity of eco-
nomics staff to participate in the advances in environmental economics emerg-
ing from the integration of behavioral economics.
Provide mechanisms for cross-disciplinary training of staff in core dis-
ciplines relevant to behavioral and decision science. The committee acknowl-
edges that the number of staff in EPA who have advanced training in these fields
is likely to remain modest even with a concerted recruitment effort, and it is
important for staff scientists who work in adjacent disciplines to have enough
familiarity to know what questions to ask (and whom to ask).
Develop improved mechanisms for integrating economic, social, be-
havioral, and decisions sciences into the development of science to support envi-
ronmental-management decisions.
Using Outside Expertise
EPA often needs to seek expertise and research from sources outside the
agency when science needs cannot be met from within. Sources include other
federal agencies (such as, the Department of Defense, the Department of En-
ergy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the US De-
partment of Agriculture), government research organizations (such as the Na-
tional Institute of Environmental Health Sciences), industrial research initiatives,
universities, consultants, state and local governments, and nongovernment or-
ganizations (EPA SAB 2011). The international community is also a good re-
source for EPA, as there is a lot of high-quality environmental and human health
research undertaken in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. International collaboration
is particularly important considering products and processes are becoming more
global and considering many environmental problems, such as the transport of
pollutants, are global in nature.
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