BAYESIAN ENVIRONMENTAL-POLICY DECISIONS - 2 CASE-STUDIES

Statistical decision theory can be a valuable tool for policy-making d ecisions. In particular, environmental problems often benefit from the application of Bayesian and decision-theoretic techniques that addres s the uncertain nature of problems in the environmental and ecological sciences. This paper discusses aspects of implementing statistical de cision-making tools in situations where uncertainty is present, lookin g at issues such as elicitation of prior distributions, covariate allo cation, formulation of loss functions, and minimization of expected lo sses subject to cooperation constraints. These ideas are illustrated t hrough two case studies in environmental remediation.