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Quantifying Model Uncertainty in Environmental Impact Assessment

By Marina G. Erechtchoukova and Peter A. Khaiter.

Published by The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability

Integrated environmental assessment is aimed at evaluation of the current and future environmental quality in order to facilitate implementation of sustainable decisions. It clearly requires appraisal of relevant natural and societal processes that affect environmental resources. Due to the ability to imitate real world system reactions to external disturbances without actual perturbation of the system, simulation models are commonly recognized as efficient tools for environmental assessment. Simulation results are used for decision/policy making process which requires not only projected values of ecosystem characteristics, but also evaluation of their uncertainty. Traditionally, evaluation of model uncertainty is conducted for a complete set of model state variables and fixed set of parameters and requires a large number of simulation runs which can be time and labour consuming. The paper examines the importance of realistic evaluation of model uncertainty in environmental assessment. Investigation of the ways how simulation results are used in environmental impact assessment suggests introduction of an output function which takes into account only interesting variables and assessment of the uncertainty of the function rather than of the entire model. The paper describes a water quality assessment case study and demonstrates the advantage of application of an output function.

The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability, Volume 4, Issue 6, pp.65-72. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 727.275KB).

Prof. Marina G. Erechtchoukova

Assistant Professor, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada

Prof. Peter A. Khaiter

Assistant Professor, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada