Environmental decision making for groundwater systems

All decisions that impact on the environment have technical, economic, social and cultural implications. To achieve our national goal of sustainable management, there is a need to develop and test environmental decision-making processes that incorporate these factors, and that take account of the inherent risk and uncertainty associated with environmental management. Three risk-based methods have been reviewed as decision-aiding tools for environmental management. These methods were evaluated against the characteristics of a typical groundwater decision problem to determine the preferred methods for each of four identified levels of decision making