A New Approach to Environmental Decision Analysis: Multi-Criteria Integrated Resource Assessment (MIRA

A new approach to environmental policy analysis is introduced that is designed to mitigate the exacerba-tion of environmental problems, which can result from the application of traditional approaches in environ-mental decision making. These approaches are prob-lematic because they tend to rely on technical fixes, a single-discipline focus, and optimality. When such tra-ditional approaches are applied, complex environ-mental problems are simplified beyond recognition, and the solution produced no longer matches the origi-nal problem. An alternative approach has been devel-oped at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that is designed to improve the utilization of sci-entific research results and data (social, physical, and biological) through a more inclusive problem-solving process aimed particularly at difficult and complex en-vironmental issues. Using a policy application per-taining to the EPA’s 1995 decision to approve a fuel additive, the authors illustrate how integrated environ-mental policy decision analysis can be made opera-tional using this new approach