EMF OP 46 Insights from Integrated Assessment

Integrated assessment is defined here as any attempt to integrate information from and across disciplines to help in the process of developing policy responses (Parson, 1994). Assessment is distinguished from disciplinary research by its purpose: to inform policy and decision, rather than to advance knowledge for its intrinsic value. Integrated assessment is identified by the breadth of knowledge sources on which it draws; it is to be distinguishes from those (infrequent) instances in which a significant policy issues can be well informed by a clear presentation of a body of knowledge held within a single discipline. Distinguishing integrated assessment from other assessment is important because integrated assessment poses distinct and difficult challenges.

The broader the set of knowledge domains that must be synthesized to inform a policy or decision, the greater the intellectual and managerial problems that must be overcome to do the assessment well and make it useful to its audience. How integrated any particular assessment must be depends on the issue or the decision to be informed. Perhaps more than any other policy issue, global climate change requires integrated assessment. Making rational, informed social decisions on climate change potentially requires knowledge of the human activities that affect greenhouse gas emissions; the atmospheric, oceanic, and biological processes that link emissions to atmospheric concentrations; the climatic and radiative processes that link atmospheric concentrations to global and regional climate; the ecological, economic, and socio-political processes by which such evaluations are made. Any progress in understanding, and responding to, an issue of such complexity will require the capacity to integrate, reconcile, organize, and communicate knowledge across domains – that is, to do integrated assessment. This need has been widely recognized, in calls to advance methods of integrated assessment, and in the large number of projects now underway. While there have been past examples of integrated assessments of major environmental issues (e.g. the American CIAP Project, Grobecker et al 1974, and the European acid rain studies integrated in the RAINS model, Alcamo et al 1990), the current level of integrated assessment activity on global climate change is unprecedented.