Science‐informed environmental management, policy, and decision‐making: Year in review and a look forward

Human well‐being is completely dependent upon functioning ecosystems and the biodiversity that underpins these systems. We manage landscapes and waterscapes to optimize the functions that we value. While this may enhance priority values, it may also reduce other ecosystem functions in place or on other spatial or temporal scales. Environmental assessment can underlie and support decision‐making by identifying the interconnected risks, benefits, and trade‐offs of various policy and management scenarios, designed to optimize benefits or to avoid or mitigate undesirable impacts. Ultimately, however, these are societal decisions; balancing trade‐offs is value‐based or normative. The role of environmental scientists is to deliver the science in a manner that is relevant to its consumers—to support science‐informed societal decision‐making. If we fail to do this, decisions will still be made—the onus is on us to ensure that we communicate in a relevant and understandable manner. The question of how we link what we can measure as scientists (and create and implement as technologists) to what we want to achieve as a society may appear, to the uninitiated, to be rather straightforward, but it is, of course, quite the opposite. Unlike “pure” science, where we seek to objectively understand biophysical processes in the absence of subjective drivers (the vast sources of bias and uncertainty in every step of the scientific process are beyond the realm of this editorial), the translation of scientific measures into indicators of human value is rife with subjective choices, whether explicitly examined or not. What values are we to examine? Whose values? Who is being consulted and included, to what extent, and when? Which scenarios are to be considered? How are scenarios scoped and scaled? What is measurable, and how? What degree of certainty is expected, and how is it communicated? What are the endpoints, thresholds, and decision criteria? What is the link between a metric, the indicator of a value, and the value being considered? How are data to be aggregated, weighed, and linked to decisions? Are there statutory decision drivers? When risks and benefits are unequally distributed, how is that addressed? All these questions are critical. Very often, these, and many equally relevant questions, and their implications, are not explicitly examined, communicated, or critically discussed. In 2005, Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management (IEAM) published its first issue, “devoted to bridging the gap between scientific research and the use of science in decision making, regulation, and environmental management” (Wenning & Parrish, 2005). Now, 18 volumes, 84 issues, and nearly 15 000 pages later, IEAM, its editors, authors, and readers have had a long and diverse conversation on the many, many layers of this topic. This is a broad remit, as all human economic and sociopolitical systems are connected to the environment at some level. However, the core focus of IEAM is environmental assessment and management. The papers that we publish address a clear tie to one or more environmental attributes, either as an endpoint of ecological value or a means to human well‐ being. Thus, the risks, benefits, and trade‐offs evaluated in a paper's decision scenarios address some metrics of environmental quality or functioning and their management or policy implications. From the first issue, IEAM published not only technical reviews and research, initially focusing primarily on chemical risk, but also debates and commentaries, critically reviewing how chemical risk is assessed, managed, and regulated, and what that means for the regulated and those who are affected by risks and their management. Over time, that perspective has expanded from a focus on managing risk to also optimizing benefits—seeking to enhance and sustain landscapes and waterscapes, considering a much broader