Good environmental decision making is information-intensive. Environmental managers invest a lot in monitoring and research to collect information, but often take a rough-and-ready approach to combining that information into a form that is useful for decision making. Does this matter? Does it make a difference to environmental outcomes to use a theoretically sound decision metric, compared with a weak decision metric? That was the question we set out to answer by comparing environmental outcomes generated by these two approaches.
What we found, in short, was that it does matter which decision metric you use. Indeed, it can make an enormous difference. As a consequence, many decision metrics used by environmental managers result in us missing out on very large environmental benefits.
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