Improving decision making for carbon management initiatives

Abstract

This paper reviews five challenges faced during decision making about carbon management initiatives. The first of these challenges deals with behavioural and perceptual obstacles, which often leads to the introduction of systematic biases during decision making. The remaining four obstacles deal with the complexity associated with the carbon management problems themselves. These include neglecting the objectives and related measurement criteria, which will guide decisions among competing risk management options; the tendency to look for singular solutions to complex problems, rather than considering a broad array of options; a lack of explicit attention devoted to the full range of tradeoffs that should be considered when choosing among alternatives; and a failure to recognise that preferences, and the decisions that result from them, are fundamentally constructive in nature. We conclude by outlining a decision-aiding approach that has been shown to improve the quality of decisions about carbon management.