Towards Data-Driven Environmental Policy Design

The Western Australian State Government Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) is managing the allocation of environmental conservation resources and funds within priority areas of high conservation significance. A particular challenge in this process, exacerbated by limited resources, is the actual identification of priority biological assets within these conservation areas. In many situations, assets will need to be prioritised by taking into account the generally large number of relevant parameters which include quantitative estimates such as asset irreplaceability as well as stakeholder opinions on relevant values (recreational, aesthetical). These stakeholders include land owners, local residents and local government authorities.
DEC has developed a framework which requires the capture of human values and the quantification of their delivery by biological assets such as species of animals and biological communities. The values are used to rank biological assets as a crucial input to environmental policy, planning and management.

The aim of this project is to deliver a methodology to capture and aggregate multiple heterogeneous data sources and any associated uncertainty in a real world environmental conservation context in order to support data-driven environmental policy design. The project will entail a close collaboration between DEC and the UK Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute where the former contributes their significant expertise and real world involvement in environmental conservation and policy design, and the latter leverages their expertise in data aggregation in a Digital Economy (DE) context where large numbers and types of different information sources are pervasive. The project will focus on two main stages: first, eliciting information (and its uncertainty) about the human value derived by different biological assets; second, modelling the captured qualitative (stakeholder opinions) and existing quantitative (e.g. asset area) data and associated uncertainty.
In doing so, we will develop and evaluate data aggregation algorithms & tools based on Fuzzy Sets and Systems and/or Fuzzy Measures & Fuzzy Integrals. The real-world application of the developed framework by DEC in conservation areas in Western Australia will provide concrete support for environmental policy-making in those areas. The project will also provide unique insights into the capacity of both the developed framework and data-driven policy design in general and in the context of environmental protection in Australia and abroad. The knowledge gained will further inform the potential for data-driven policy design in the DE in other areas where large numbers of stakeholders and information sources are pervasive.

We believe that this project under the "Research in the Wild" call will lead to significant impact for a variety of stakeholders as summarized below:

Commercial Private sector:
Benefits for the private sector will be generated on two levels: (i) the actual engagement of private sector stakeholder opinions in the decision process for environmental conservation "on the ground" through the developed framework. (ii) The potential for leveraging the developed information capturing & aggregation methodologies towards enabling data-driven policy design in the private sector as well as the creation of new services in the Digital Economy (e.g. app based services that mine public opinion and aggregate it with quantitative data such as location information).

Public sector and policy makers at a national and international level:
The project will have direct impact through invstiagting and demonstrating novel techniques: (i) enabling direct interaction with stakeholders (and capturing their views), (ii) allowing data-driven (informed) policy-design in an environmental context and beyond (in other context such as data protection and user privacy) based on integrating qualitative AND quantitative data. As the project partner DEC is a government department, the project outcomes will be deployed and demonstrated in a real-world policy making context which will support the dissemination of the project outcomes.

General public:
The general public and governmental institutions will benefit directly from our work which explores a data-driven approach to policy making through: (i) enabling the incorporation of quantitative AND qualitative stakeholder information into the policy-making process. (ii) enabling user-driven policies and better distribution of for example conservation funds, maximising the benefit of the available funds according to the priorities expressed by the public.

Academia:
The development of approaches to capture, aggregate and reason over qualitative and quantitatve data sources will provide new insight into the utility and applicability of computational intelligence techniques for this application, thus helping to shape future research in this area of computer science. Importantly, the general capability of reasoning and modelling accross such heterogeneous sources is expected to be of high interest and utility for research beyond computer science, for example in research fields such as sociology and marketing where the proposed approach will provide a pathway to a deeper understanding of data from and on people which is available and rapidly increasing in the current digital economy.

All the above will directly benefit from the open-source publication of the stakeholder-opinion capturing toolkit which will make the project outcomes accessible to the different stakeholders.

Finally, it is worth noting that the approach to the capturing, modelling and aggregation/interpretation of heterogeneous data sources is applicable in a number of conservation and other contexts, including for example the construction of new power plants for harnessing tidal power and satisfying requirements ranging from the obligation to combat climate change to minimizing changes of wildlife habitats in estuaries as well as the design of policies for data protection and user privacy.