Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making

The 21st century promises to be an era dominated by international response to c- tain global environmental challenges such as climate change, depleting biodiversity and biocapacity as well as general atmospheric, water and soil pollution problems. Consequently, Environmental decision making (EDM) is a socially important ?eld of development for Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS). - certainty is an important feature of these decision problems and it intervenes at very different time and space scales. The Handbook on “Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making” provides a guided tour of selected methods and tools that OR/MS offer to deal with these issues. Below, we brie?y introduce, peer reviewed, chapters of this handbook and the topics that are treated by the invited authors. The ?rst chapter is a general introduction to the challenges of environmental decision making, the use of OR/MS techniques and a range of tools that are used to deal with uncertainty in this domain.

Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making: A Handbook of Research and Best Practice presents the state of the art in applying operations research and management science (OR/MS) techniques to a broad range of environmental decision making (EDM) challenges. Drawing on leading researchers in the field, it provides a guided tour of selected methods and tools to help deal with issues as climate change, depleting biodiversity and biocapacity, and more general atmospheric, water and soil pollution problems. Individual peer-reviewed chapters look at applying stochastic reasoning on difficult issues arising in EDM under uncertainty; applying stochastic or robust programming methods to techno-economic modeling of energy/environment interactions; important consequences of uncertainty inherent in weather patterns, the El Nino phenomenon and anticipated climate change; exploiting tools of decision analysis, utility theory and optimal control theory to account for differences in time scales between human development processes and the natural processes of the biosphere; and methods that combine statistical and decision analyses that can support a variety of environmental management problems.

This important new work will be of special interest to a wide range of researchers, students, and practitioners in environmental economics, OR/MS, environmental and earth sciences, climatologists, and risk assessment.