It’s hard to find win-wins in environmental governance

A booming marine fishery can increase its shrimp catch and reduce unintentional turtle bycatch. This is an example of what environmental managers and scientists call a “win/win” situation. Although models often predict the ideal outcome, stakeholders rarely see it in practice. Now, a Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences CIRES-led study integrates the complexity and concerns of the real environment into models. This helps to explain the discrepancy and validates stakeholders’ concerns, and provides realistic expectations for environmental management in the future.

“If a model predicts that a fishery will catch a certain number of fish without any bycatch, or that a farm will harvest a certain quantity of corn while cutting down on harmful fertilizer, but fishermen and farmers report the opposite, it leads to frustration on both ends,” said Margaret Hegwood, a University of Colorado Boulder graduate student studying Environmental Studies and lead author of the new study. Nature Sustainability.

“We used math in order to show that real-world complexity makes win/wins harder to achieve, allowing scientists and stakeholders compromise and aim to achieve more achievable, realistic goals about the environment, food production, biodiversity and economic yield,” said Hegwood. Hegwood is also a USDA Food Technology and Food Security Fellow. Hegwood said that adding more variables, such as another species, another stakeholder or additional regulations, reduces the chances of a win/win.

The team also analysed 280 tradeoff models previously created and developed algorithms to show how the severity might change as more variables were included. The modelers can better understand the managers they deal with and the managers can better understand these models.

Ryan Langendorf (CU Boulder Environmental Studies postdoctoral researcher) said that “at its core, it’s a study on how to bridge a communication gap.” “There’s a wrong and right, but scientists and stakeholders see the problem differently. We hope that their work will help them find common ground so people can work more effectively together.

Langendorf said, “It’s less important to find a better win-win than it is about communicating what the win really looks like.” This could mean adjusting goals to be more realistic. Langendorf said, “Instead of asking, “Is it the ideal outcome for only one objective?” We need to change our thinking to ask ourselves, “Are we better off than where we started?” Hegwood said.

“Better” could be defined as sacrificing some fish catch, but reducing the amount of bycatch. What happenedAn example of this is in the Australian shrimp fishery, which added turtle excluders to its trawlnets to protect sea turtles in 2011. Or, “better” could refer to reducing regulatory or political barriers to achieving win-wins. “A win-win requires that a community has certain resources they don’t have. This will prevent them from achieving the ideal outcome. Hegwood stated that by identifying and minimizing these barriers, the win-win is more possible.

“Managers seem to have a heightened intuition that win-wins in the real world are harder to find than in models,” stated Mattew Burgess (CIRES Fellow, assistant professor in Environmental Studies at CU Boulder, and corresponding author of the study. “Our study demonstrates mathematically why managers’ intuition is correct. We hope this will help modelers and managers to communicate in a common language.