Decision support experiments and evaluations using seasonal to ...

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program Chapter 3
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Figure 3.4 El Niño precipitation anomalies in inches (Source: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory)
makers have this level of support for using climate
forecasts and associated information. The
absence of such support systems may increase
managers’ exposure to risk, in turn generating a
strong disincentive to use climate forecasts.
3.4 SUMMARY
Decision-support systems are not often well
integrated into policy networks to support planning
and management, making it difficult to
convey information. Among the reasons for
this are a tendency toward institutional conservatism
by water agencies, a decision-making
climate that discourages innovation, lack of
national-scale coordination of decisions, difficulties
in providing support for decisions at
varying spatial and temporal scales due to vast
variability in “target audiences” for products,
and growing recognition that rational choice
models of information transfer are overly
simplistic. The case of information use in response
to Georgia’s recent drought brings to
light problems that students of water decision
making have long described about resistance
to innovation.
Ensuring information relevance requires overcoming
the barriers of over-specialization by
encouraging inter-disciplinary collaboration in
product and tool development. Decision makers
need to learn to appreciate the inevitability
and desirability of forecast uncertainties at a
regional scale on the one hand, and potential decreases
in accuracy on the other. Scientists must
understand both internal institutional impediments
(agency rules and regulations) as well as
external ones (e.g., political-level conflicts over
water allocation as exemplified in the Southeast
United States, asymmetries in information access
in the case of Northeast Brazil) as factors
constraining decision-support translation and
decision transformation. While the nine cases
discussed here have been useful and instructive,
more generalizable findings are needed in order
to develop a strong, theoretically-grounded
understanding of processes that facilitate information
dissemination, communication, use, and
evaluation—and to predict effective methods of
boundary spanning between decision makers
and information generators. We discuss this set
of problems in Chapter 4.