Time to build capacity for evidence synthesis in environmental management

Abstract

The increasing need to intervene and manage our environment, from the local to global level, is evident from the impacts humans have on its condition. Nowhere on earth remains untouched by humanity. In turn, the state of the environment has both direct and indirect impacts on human health, wellbeing and developmental capacity. Environmental management is therefore inherently interdisciplinary and involves many interactions between the environment, human health, wellbeing and behaviour. Poverty alleviation is unlikely to be successful if we do not tackle climate change and food security, and similarly, disease eradication will not succeed without water security and pollution control. Environmental management is not an isolated task that can be put to one side in hard times but needs to be an integral part of all of our major global efforts to improve human welfare and quality of life. Tough policy decisions need to be made in environmental management just as in other sectors but the synthesised evidence base required to inform these decisions is largely absent. Although large amounts of data have been collected on the state of the environment, human impacts on the environment and effectiveness of efforts to manage it, this rapidly increasing body of data has not been organised into a coherent evidence base to inform decision making. The potential of this evidence to help us make tough decisions is therefore not being realised. In contrast, the evidence base for many health interventions is well established. For example, in the health sector the Cochrane Collaboration Library (www.cochrane.org) contains in the order of 6000 systematic reviews (SRs) of evidence of effectiveness of health interventions, the equivalent Collaboration for Environmental Evidence (CEE) Library (www.environmentalevidence.org/Reviews. html) for environmental management contains just 60; a two-orders of magnitude evidence deficit. This imbalance between sectors is brought into sharp focus when interdisciplinary evidence is required, such as for international

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.