Environmental risks and impacts - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 222

Some characteristic difficulties in environmental decision making are enlisted here:

- Most of the environmental decisions are non-routine and apply to unique cases;

- The problems lying behind the decisions are often not entirely clear (particularly in

the case of pollution which has already occurred) and there are no clearly specified
alternative solutions;

- Preparation of environmental decisions is generally time-consuming (months or

years) and expensive;

- Lack of scientific knowledge is always present in our environmental risk manage-

ment activities and decision making;

- Generally, the environmental decisions are associated with high uncertainty;

- Uncertainties due to defining the objectives to be achieved:

◦ Decision-makers' aims in terms of targets to be achieved may differ from

the expectations of the authorities or the interest of the ecosystem, etc.;

◦ A lack of knowledge at the time of task determination.

- Uncertainties due to environmental heterogeneities:

◦ Lack of data or no adequate spatial or temporal resolution;

◦ Lack of statistical evaluation of the situation;

◦ Lack of methodologies to handle environmental uncertainties.

- Often only poor and unreliable information is available, so that the decision is

either established on partial or poor-quality data or we have to spend time and
money for the acquisition of new, good-quality, targeted data. To bridge the gap
between the two extremes, a tiered approach with worst-case estimation and an
iterative approximation are necessary to achieve the optimum;

- When there is a lack of extensive scientific knowledge on the matter, a precaution-

ary approach should be applied;

- One has to be conservative to a certain extent, but overestimating risk means

additional costs in risk reduction. It is necessary to optimize costs and quality of
information throughout the decision-making process;

- The role of limiting conditions in decision-making are as follows:

◦ The rigid application of regulations in many cases does not take into account

real conditions, and thus the given task is doomed to failure;

◦ Tiered decision making is not applied;

◦ Integrated approaches are not applied.

- The validation of the correspondence of the decision may need years or decades,

and the short-term result may differ from the long-term one;

- Environmental decision making is often accompanied by conflicts because of the

large number of participants and their differing interests;

- Communication during the decision process is an important activity for

stakeholders, professionals and the relevant part of the society.

A perfect environmental decision needs an experienced team of professionals,
politicians, regulators, managers, owners, engineers and scientists, and a suitable
amount of money and time for the preparation of the decision. Proper communication
toward nonprofessionals who have financial, social, cultural, aesthetic or emotional
arguments,

requires a well-prepared decision-making team. Even in the case of