Strategic management of the Uredo rangelii Fungus (SMURF). Final report

[摘要] The ability to make smart decisions is fundamental to the success of environmental management.In managing the risks resulting from biological invasion, managers and policy makers are constantly facing the challenges of diverse or even conflicting values of multiple stakeholders and significant levels of uncertainty.Without the help of an analytical approach, the decision-making tends to suffer from problems such as omission of some critical values and gross mis-characterization of event uncertainties.We apply a Structured Decision Making (SDM) approach in planning for myrtle rust response actions.SDM provides an organized analytical approach to identifying stakeholders' key concerns, evaluating creative alternatives and addressing tradeoffs explicitly and openly.Based on results of stakeholder deliberation during two participatory workshops and 18 individual interviews conducted between the workshops, five clear policy alternatives were identified.These include Do nothing, Live with it, Slow the spread, 'Eradication-lite' and 'Eradication-full'.Each alternative is assessed on the basis of five objectives (or criteria) representing stakeholders' major concerns about myrtle rust incursion and management.They include: minimizing the rust's impacts on industry; minimizing its impacts on natural ecosystems; minimizing its impact on amenity values; minimizing the cost of policy implementation, and; minimizing the side effect of the implementation.The first three objectives concern direct impacts of myrtle rust, while the last two relate to the consequences of the policy actions.The key uncertainties surrounding the current myrtle rust incursion were explored with the use of a decision tree with two distinct management phases.Phase one involves local spread, where myrtle rust is detected in another cluster of Infested Premises (IPs) in native bushland within the next 5 years which cannot be explained by tracing.Phase two involves wide spread where the rust spreads to 4 or more states or territories.The uncertainties associated with these two phases were represented by two probabilities, P1 and P2.Any of the five policy options can be employed by policy-makers prior to local spread (i.e. phase 1), but only three policy actions are deemed plausible after local spread happens (i.e. phase 2): Do nothing, Live with it, and Slow the spread.A group of 24 industry stakeholders, biosecurity managers, and scientists attended the final SDM workshop in Canberra on November 22nd and 23rd. Over the course of the two days, workshop participants validated the decision framework, updated the consequence table (where performance of the policy alternatives were assessed against objectives), and assigned values for key parameters and objective weights.Applying SDM to the problem of how to manage myrtle rust in the short to long term, the decision making group concluded the following:(i)Between now and when local spread occurs, 'Do nothing' is not a preferred option.(ii)There is a slight preference for the Eradicate-lite and Eradicate-full options over the less interventionist alternatives. However, the relative preference for Eradicate-lite and Eradicate-full is highly dependent on the value assumed for P1 (probability of local spread). A sensitivity analysis indicated that Eradicate full might only be considered worthwhile if the probability of eradication success is greater than 20-40% at the present time.(iii)After local spread happens, 'Slow the spread' is generally preferred regardless of which of the five pre-local spread alternatives is selected.Although the SDM approach adopted here can be applied in a broad range of decision making contexts, the conclusions are case specific. They are contingent on the technical assumptions made in formulating the decision problem and the value judgments of the final workshop participants, both of which are documented in the main body of the report.

[发布日期] 2011-01-05 [发布机构] CSIRO

[学科分类] 地球科学(综合)