9513010 Russell The Joint Institute for Energy and Environment at the University of Tennessee, a collaborative arrangement of the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, will establish the NSF National Center for Environmental Decision-Making Research (the Center). The Center will engage environmental decision makers, primarily at the subnational level, with the processes and data they need to confront and solve difficult environmental decision problems. Now, and even more in the future, these decision makers are the ones critical to achieving measurable improvement in the environment at acceptable social and economic costs. Yet they are ill-equipped to know how their decisions should be effectively structured to assure effective implementation. The Center will improve environmental decision making by performing a series of complementary tasks: (1) synthesizing and analyzing existing research to provide in an accessible form findings relevant to improving environmental decision making; (2) performing case studies of decisions made (or not made) in response to environmental problems as a diagnostic tool to illuminate what has been and what remains to be learned; (3) assembling a toolkit of processes and techniques that decision makers can use in addressing their environmental problems; (4) designing a 21st century information system to support decision makers; (5) involving decision makers as both partners in the research and clients for its products. %%%% 9513010 Russell The Joint Institute for Energy and Environment at the University of Tennessee, a collaborative arrangement of the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, will establish the NSF National Center for Environmental Decision-Making Research (the Center). The Center will engage environmental decision makers, primarily at the subnational level, with the processes and data they need to confront and solve difficult envir onmental decision problems. Now, and even more in the future, these decision makers are the ones critical to achieving measurable improvement in the environment at acceptable social and economic costs. Yet they are ill-equipped to know how their decisions should be effectively structured to assure effective implementation. The Center will improve environmental decision making by performing a series of complementary tasks: (1) synthesizing and analyzing existing research to provide in an accessible form findings relevant to improving environmental decision making; (2) performing case studies of decisions made (or not made) in response to environmental problems as a diagnostic tool to illuminate what has been and what remains to be learned; (3) assembling a toolkit of processes and techniques that decision makers can use in addressing their environmental problems; (4) designing a 21st century information system to support decision makers; (5) involving decision makers as both partners in the research and clients for its products. ****
