Modelling everything everywhere: A new approach to decision-making for water management under uncertainty

Abstract

1.There are increasing demands to predict ecohydrological responses to future changes in catchments but such predictions will be inevitably uncertain because of natural variability and different sources of knowledge (epistemic) uncertainty. 2.Policy setting and decision-making should therefore reflect these inherent uncertainties in both model predictions and potential consequences. 3.This is the focus of a U.K. Natural Environment Research Council knowledge exchange project called the Catchment Change Network (CCN). The aim is to bring academics and practitioners together to define Guidelines for Good Practice in incorporating risk and uncertainty into assessments of the impacts of change. 4.Here, we assess the development of such Guidelines in the context of having catchment models of everywhere. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.