A best-practice guidance document on how to build decision-support tools based on careful consideration of prerequisites, requirements, and scoping for informing the management of cumulative effects in the coastal environment.
Managing cumulative effects in the coastal environment is challenging. Decision-support tools can be useful for informing resource management decision-making providing they meet certain prerequisites and are scoped appropriately.
Decision-support tools must focus on the specific needs of decision-makers. Being able to robustly describe the scientific concepts and processes relevant to the decisions to be supported, including ecological, hydrodynamic, chemical processes, stressor-environment interactions, and, especially for cumulative effects, the interrelationships of stressors, is the most challenging prerequisite because of the inherent complexities in these concepts and processes. Due to scientific information gaps or uncertainties identified during this step, it may not be possible to develop decision-support tools for some applications. However, supporting decision-making does not necessarily require mathematical tools.
Resource management decisions are important and enduring. Decisions are final and can have significant environmental, economic, societal, cultural, and legal consequences. For these reasons, decision-support tools must be scientifically robust. For the outputs of decision-support tools to effectively inform resource management decisions, they need to be ecologically meaningful and interpretable in the context of policies and plans. Another key requirement of decision-support tools is the ability to identify uncertainties because otherwise scientific experts could not rely on them if presenting evidence to council hearings or the Environment Court. Access to decision-support tools must be reasonable, in terms of timeliness and cost. The cost of using a decision-support tool should be proportionate to the value the tool adds to the decision-making process, recognising that any tool is only one of several scientific information sources. A useful approach for illustrating the required scope of decision-support tools is the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework. Applying the DPSIR framework to resource management decision-making processes demonstrates that decision-support tools need to include pressure, state, and impact to ensure that outputs can be linked to pressures and that impact is made explicit so that it can be interpreted in the relevant policy framework.
Based on these considerations, a conceptual decision-support tool structure is presented below:
The ability to validate decision-support tools is improved if development starts with comparatively simple tools and if complexity is gradually added. The likelihood of implementation is maximised by working with decision-making in the selection of resource management processes to support. Systematically compiling information gaps during the decision-support tool developement could inform a more strategic approach towards addressing scientific knowledge gaps related to managing cumulative effects.
