Environmental decision making for groundwater systems

Abstract

All decisions that impact on the environment have technical, economic, social and cultural implications. To achieve our national goal of sustainable management, there is a need to develop and test environmental decision-making processes that incorporate these factors, and that take account of the inherent risk and uncertainty associated with environmental management. Three risk-based methods have been reviewed as decision-aiding tools for environmental management. These methods were evaluated against the characteristics of a typical groundwater decision problem to determine the preferred methods for each of four identified levels of decision making.