Guidance for Modeling Causes and Effects in Environmental Problem Solving

摘要

Environmental problems are difficult to solve because their causes and effects are difficult to analyze and understand. The guidance pertains to an easy to understand and apply procedure for organizing and simplifying complex information into a cause and effects model through an interdisciplinary exercise. Information is included on prerequisites to help ensure completion of a useful model, applications of model information in environmental assessment and problem solving, diagnosing and correcting modeling problems when users encounter difficulties, and technical limitations of the approach. In relationship to application of model results to environmental impact statements and other documents, some users include development of an outline for a document to be written, and serving as a technical framework for evaluating adequacy of existing documents.