Summary
Running a structured decision making process: the triage process
It is important to follow a structured decision making process which is intended to help define the aim, scope, methods and tools necessary for the marine ecosystem services assessment.
This wil ensure that it will be:
- meaningful: interpretable
- useful: in relation to management concerns, needs and projects
- feasible: according to the available knowledge and resources.
The principle of a structured decision making process is to run steps in order to decide what evaluation to run for what objective in which context. A method proposed here in order to reach this objective is called the TRIAGE process [Pendleton et al., 2014].
Its principle is to provide a procedure for delimiting the scope of a potential marine ecosystem services quantitative assessment using a step-wise process to refine the initial broad-scale analysis and to consider, as objectively as possible, the relevance of marine ecosystem services assessment and valuation in a particular situation.
The triage process aims to identify:
- the policy issues for which a marine ecosystem services assessment is expected to provide new evidence
- the parts of the system to be considered in relation to these policy issues
- the sensitivity of the considered marine ecosystem services to natural or social factors of change
- the appropriate methods for valuation
- the feasibility of a marine ecosystem services assessment in practice
For additional information
Date: 2012-2015
The work presented here has been developed in six case studies of the VALMER Interreg 4A Channel project (2012-2015).
Coordination by M. Philippe, J. Ballé-Béganton and D. Bailly,
based on written contributions from N. Smith, P. Hoskin, W. Dodds, T. Hooper, L. Friedrich, N. Beaumont and C. Grifths