By Amy Charlene
Reed RiskWorld staff,
E-mail to: reed@tec-com.com.
A new National Center for Environmental Decision Making Research has been established by the Joint Institute for Energy and Environment (JIEE) with funding of $1 million per year for five years from the National Science Foundation, together with matching funds from other organizations. The center's director is Milton Russell, who is also head of JIEE, a research consortium of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the University of Tennessee.
"The center's goal is to provide regional, state, and local decision makers across the nation with the information, techniques, and processes they need to solve environmental problems," said Russell, who formerly was an assistant administrator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "We chose that focus because up to now most decision research programs have been at the national level under well-established federal agencies. There has been relatively little analysis of environmental and health decision making at what we call the sub-national level."
How the Center Came To Be
The idea for the national center came from "forward-looking people" at the National Science Foundation who thought the nation needed an institution devoted to improving environmental decision making, Russell said. "They wrote a proposal that was purposefully loosely constructed, asking for the best ideas from around the country about what the nation should have in a center to assist environmental decision making."
In response, JIEE submitted the winning proposal, which focused on environmental decision making at the local, state, and regional levels.
"This opportunity struck a very responsive cord in all three of JIEE's parent organizations, which are deeply involved in environmental work and in environmental decision making," Russell said. "We felt that we could really make a difference at the sub-national level."
JIEE's parent organizations are providing additional funding equal to approximately 75% of the National Science Foundation's grant of $1 million a year for five years. The foundation's grant is renewable for another six years for a total of 11 years possible, depending on the center's performance and the availability of funds.
Researching Decision Making
The center's first task will be to distill, develop, and synthesize information about how environmental decisions are made.
"Our product will be research results that will help everyone - including other researchers - to understand the processes by which environmental decisions get made, what causes the gridlock that sometimes occurs, and how these decision-making processes can be improved," Russell said. "We want to help make the decisions less costly, more rapid, and less disruptive to the community."
The task's research results will be made available in various forms - as research papers in scholarly journals, perhaps as a printed reference book, or as an expert system in an electronic form. "We want to take the enormous amount of research that has been done over the last 15 years in decision making and put it together in a way that is potentially useable by real people making real decisions, such as a county executive who is siting a landfill," Russell said.
Investigating Issues Using Case Studies
The center's second task will consist of case studies of selected experiences with environmental decision making.
"We will not be asking 'what happened' but instead 'with respect to this particular issue, what can we learn from the way the interactions took place at this time in this place that will illuminate the problems we've identified in our previous discussions,'" Russell said. "The case studies will not be a general review of what happened. Instead, they will be particularized, targeted investigations of some aspects of the decisions. "
Initially, the center will focus on three cases: hazardous waste remediation at the U.S. Department of Energy's reservation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; the outcomes of ground level ozone regulations, using the premier study of ozone issues in the country, the Southern Oxidant Study by North Carolina State University at Raleigh and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta; and the environmental consequences of the restructuring of the nation's electric utility industry, using the experiences of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other utilities as a test bed. The center will select other cases based on the findings of the other tasks.
Designing a Tool Kit
The third task will be to assemble a kit of decision-aiding tools for use at the local, state, and regional levels. This task also will include conducting research and development on needed tools.
"Existing tools such as cost-benefit analysis were originally designed to help with large-scale, national-level decision making," Russell said. "We want to remold those tools - analytical tools, sociological tools, and others - to address the decision making that happens on a localized or small level. Just because a decision is small doesn't mean that it is not important. First of all, it is important to the people involved. And secondly, there are a lot of these decisions being made all over the country."
The tool kit task will be stimulated by the analysis and synthesis task, and the tools out of the tool kit will be tested in the case study task. Thus, the three tasks will comprise an integrated research program.
Initiating a National Environmental Data Base
In its fourth task, which is somewhat independent of the first three, the center will take the first steps toward building a national environmental data base that integrates the many far-flung environmental data sources into a single, coherent, user-friendly system. To gain an understanding of the structure that is needed for such a data base, the center will host symposia and workshops.
"We want to create the seed bed for a national effort to think through the concept and architecture of such a data system for the 21st century," Russell said. "In principle, the computer hardware and software that will make this possible already exist. What doesn't exist is a full understanding of what is needed. We need to find out what the customers of such a system need to make decisions, what the quality control issues are, how precise the data must be."
Russell reiterated that the center will only be taking the first steps in creating the data system. "The entire job will be a truly immense task - a multiyear project. In the long term, it will be a national effort."
The purpose of this national infrastructure for environmental information will be to provide a resource for decision making at both the national and sub-national levels, but Russell expects the biggest payoff to be at the sub-national level because that is where most of the decisions are being made.
Disseminating Its Findings
In addition to its research initiatives, the center will have an outreach program aimed at communicating its findings across the nation. To accomplish this, the center plans to involve academicians, private sector and public sector decision makers, and citizens groups in its work.
The center will have an advisory board consisting of a chairman and three panels made up of representatives from industry, government, and citizen groups concerned with environmental justice. The members will be drawn from geographically dispersed areas.
The center also will have a Decision Maker in Residence program, which will bring government officials and private sector business leaders involved in environmental decision making to work at the center for two-week to three-months assignments, as well as a post-doctoral program, which will offer one-year positions for beginning researchers and graduate assistants involved with decision making research.
For More Information
For additional information, contact the National Center for Environmental Decision Making Research by telephone (423) 974-3939 or fax (423) 974-4609, or write to the center at 600 Henley Street, Suite 314, Knoxville, TN 37996-4138.
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Story posted November 1995
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