SCIENCE FOR PUBLIC POLICY: 



HIGHLIGHTS OF ADAPTIVE ENVIRONMENTAL 



ASSESSMENT AND MANAGEMENT 



C. S. Holling 



It all started with GIRLS. That was the acronym chosen for the Gulf Island 

 Recreational Land Simulation study. GIRLS was an exercise to explore ways of 

 bridging gaps between disciplines, and between subject-matter experts and policy 

 designers. It was thefirst step in a sequence that has since led to the concepts, 

 methods and procedures of adaptive environmental assessment and management 

 (AEAM). 



The essential purpose of AEAM is to provide a flexible, adaptive approach to 

 environmental planning, assessment, and management. Its methods draw upon a 

 variety of modeling techniques to capture the essential biophysical and economic 

 interactions, on policy analytic techniques to generate alternative policies, and on 

 decision techniques to evaluate policy consequences. Its procedures emphasize a 

 sequence of interactive workshops whose purpose is to combine the strengths of the 

 expert, the manager and policy maker so that relevant knowledge is focused on policy 

 questions which lead to adaptive decision making. The approach has been described 

 indetail' and in summary form' elsewhere. Herel shall concentrate on the dilemmas, 

 complexities, and issues that arise in the development and application of such an 

 approach. 



This approach dates back to 1968 when it seemed opportune to capitalize on two 

 trends. At that time, we observed, "first, there was a growing realization that a new 

 class of resource and environmental problems was appearing, as exponential demand 

 stretched the resilience of resource and environmental systems. 



Second, with the development of computers and modeling techniques, new 

 approaches and methods had been developed to handle complex systems with many 

 variables. For the first time, therefore, it seemed possible to design new research and 

 policy strategies for those situations having large numbers of interacting com- 

 ponents. 



In order to capitalize on this historical junction, however, it was essential to 

 recognize that the history of the resource sciences had been moving very much in the 

 opposite direction. Each of the disciplines — resource economics, ecology, geo- 

 physics, agriculture, fisheries, wildlife biology — had been developing overlapping 

 but often independent methods and concepts. In addition, related forces had led to a 

 growing separation between institutions, so that gaps developed in the logical flow of 

 activities from basic to applied research, to design and pilot studies, and to policy 

 formulation and implementation. Wherever we looked, therefore, it seemed that 

 there were gaps between methods, between disciplines, between institutions and 

 between constituencies. The gaps in this sequence of activities, shown in Figure 1, 



The Author. Professor Holling is on leave from the Institute of Resource Ecology. University of British 

 Columbia. Vancouver. Canada, to serve as Director of the International Institute for Applied Systems 

 .Analysis, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria. His present research interest is in the physiology of surprise! 



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