Making Decisions for Policy and Practice.
Abstract
This chapter describes the various stages in the conservation decision process and provides tools to support the decision maker to integrate relevant information when considering potential alternatives, assessing trade-offs and deciding how to act. Many decisions can be decided easily, as either obvious or trivial, thus requiring no additional assessment of different stages of the process. The harder decisions then require assessing the likely consequences of options and determining the preferred trade off. There is a range of approaches for making each of these stages more rigorous, reducing the likelihood of making inefficient decisions. These approaches are described with an account of the situations under which each approach is most appropriate to address the conservation problem.