Reducing Uncertainty in Models for Environmental Decision-Making

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) in collaboration with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is supporting a scoping study on ‘Reducing Uncertainty in Models for Environmental Decision-Making’.

With the aim of enhancing the performance of environmental models, the study will focus on identifying priority science questions that a future research programme on this topic should seek to address, together with possible funding mechanisms for such a programme.

A large number of numerical models are used in environmental policy support or regulatory decision-making. Generally, such models have been developed to meet a specific purpose and have used the best science available at the time. In some cases, further work has been commissioned to remedy well recognised weaknesses, but in many cases the models continue to be used despite recognition of large uncertainties within their outputs.

The programme to be scoped is concerned with the study of individual environmental processes or properties, or the way in which they are described within models, with a view to enhancing the ways in which these models simulate the natural environment.