Enhancing the role of scientific assessments in public policy
Overview
What was the impact of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) on global assessments, and how can global assessments be strengthened to improve their impact on public policy in the coming decades? As we approach the 20th anniversary of the publication of the MA, are preparing a set of papers to explore lessons from the experience of the MA that could inform this new landscape of environmental assessments. Given both the growing demands on scientists to engage in environmental assessments and the urgent needs of policymakers to address environmental challenges at all spatial scales, it is critical for assessments to be designed and implemented in a manner that is both efficient and impactful.
Project Lead: Elena Bennett
Approach
Scientific assessments are an important mechanism for informing policy making processes with the findings of scientific research, and they have been widely used in connection with global environmental issues. Well known examples include the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which informs the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion which informs the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Most of the more than 700 international environmental treaties require some form of periodic science assessment.
While environmental assessments historically focused on providing policymakers with an understanding of the causes of global environmental change and how those changes might impact society, the scope of environmental assessments has changed significantly in the past two decades. Environmental assessments are now widely used at multiple scales of decision-making and for a wider array of issues. Where environmental assessments once focused primarily on the outcomes of biophysical changes such as the impact of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere on climate, they are now increasingly including ecological changes and complex feedbacks between social and ecological systems. At the same time, the scope of knowledge that is incorporated into scientific assessments has become more inclusive and the use of assessments has been shifting from a primary focus on problem definition to increasing attention paid to the assessment of potential solutions and even possible pathways towards a more sustainable world.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), published in 2005, foreshadowed many of these changes in the role of environmental assessments. The MA, which focused on the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being, was the first ‘multi-scale’ global assessment, the first to incorporate traditional knowledge in the formal assessment process, the first to attempt to incorporate complex social-ecological dynamics, and included one of the more ambitious efforts to assess options for solutions. In short, the MA set out to change what was possible to do in a global assessment, bringing ecology and people to center stage to explore, and possibly change, the world.
As we approach the 20th anniversary of the publication of the MA, we are preparing a special issue that will explore lessons from the experience of the MA that could inform this new landscape of environmental assessments. Given both the growing demands on scientists to engage in environmental assessments and the urgent needs of policymakers to address environmental challenges at all spatial scales, it is critical for assessments to be designed and implemented in a manner that is both efficient and impactful. By examining the pioneering elements of the MA and the impact that they have or have not had over the past twenty years, the goal of the special issue is to help to magnify the impact of the environmental assessments that are now being designed and launched.
project collaborators
Walt Reid, Monika Zurek, Neville Ash, Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, John Ehrmann, Keisha Garcia, Marcus Lee, Pushpam Kumar, Dick Norgaard, Tom Dietz, Clark Miller, Garry Peterson, Janet Ranganathan, Blane Harvey, Noel Castree, Silke Beck, Esther Turnhout, Myanna Lahsen, Zuzana Harmackova, Laura Pereira, Coleen Vogel