Tools for Better Decision Making: Bridges from Science to Policy - Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems - page 282

application by experts. The chief requirements of decision makers for tools are
simplicity, rapidity, transparency and reliability.
A key challenge for decision makers is to act on new scientific evidence and
modify current policies and practices accordingly. The potentially rapid shifts in
ecosystem conditions that may result from climate change make it imperative
that decision makers are responsive to emerging scientific evidence and act
quickly. This process would be helped by a greater engagement with the scientific
community to guide the development of new tools required for decision making
and policy development.
Building bridges between science, policy makers and stakeholders is another
important challenge that has to be met if better decision making in the context of
climate change is to be achieved. Links between policy makers and stakeholders
are becoming more prevalent and embedded within policy development and
implementation practice. Such participation has, for instance, been included in
the implementation of the WFD and is also a key element of the Ecosystem
Approach. New tools to facilitate this are being developed and the Euro-limpacs
DSS provides one such example.
Information and approaches from many sources and perspectives should be
integrated when addressing current and future freshwater ecosystem management
problems. Within the scientific community, integration between the natural
sciences and the social sciences, including economics, is essential in order to fully
appreciate the indirect social and economic effects on freshwater ecosystems that
might result from climate change. These indirect effects can often arise
unexpectedly both because of a lack of relevant information on outcomes and
because of the uncertainty inherent in human responses to climate change, as
embodied in the range of IPCC climate scenarios.
The growing importance of the concept of ecosystem services in national
and EU-wide policy frameworks will also make this scientific interdisciplinarity
essential: social scientists are needed to understand societal choices and
preferences, natural scientists to quantify and understand ecosystem
functioning, economists to value the services derived from those functions and
the costs of producing and protecting them, and policy makers to develop
policy mechanisms to preserve or enhance ecosystem service delivery. All of
the tools outlined here, and others, will be needed to achieve this.
References
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Birol, E., Karousakis, K. & Koundouri, P. (2006a) Using a choice experiment to account for preference
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