Tales of the unexpected

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Symposium "Tales of the Unexpected"

This year’s Annual AAAS meeting earlier this year in Boston saw much joint activity between AAAS and the EU. The highlight was a packed session organized by the EU Joint Research Centre on how science advisers deal with uncertainty in policy advice, in which the Commission’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Anne Glover, spoke alongside the Presidential Science Adviser, Dr. John Holdren, and CSaP’s Miles Parker. It attracted an audience of about 300 and led to active questioning.

During the session, John Holdren identifies the main questions for science advisers as being:

What do we know? With what confidence? What more do we need to know? And by when can we know it?

He also identifies four kinds of uncertainty:-

- Pseudo - i.e. variable factors that can be corrected for; he gave an example of location and time in ecological contexts.

- True variability and heterogeneities that can't be controlled

- Gaps in current scientific understanding

- Stochastic variability.

Holdren identifies a series of pitfalls in handling uncertainty and corresponding good practice in handling them:-

- Omission or understatement of uncertainty, giving politicians undue security

- Overstatement or use of pseudo uncertainties to impede certain course of political action (e.g. some climate nay-sayers)

- Failure to focus on relevance/ irrelevance to policy issue in hand

- Failure to address costs and time of seeking further information to reduce uncertainty, impeding "wait or go" decisions?

Regarding the last pitfall, Holdren expands on the dangers of treating uncertainty as one sided, illustrating this with respect to climate change; i.e. the uncertainties that are used to suggest that climate change might not be as bad as forecast (motivating a waiting approach to mitigating action) are matched by a risk that they might be worse. In general, if one side of an argument is based on a comprehensive coherent account with majority consensus, it should hold more weight than doubts raised on the strength of single issues, as the latter often reflect a misunderstanding of how science works.

Miles Parker, speaking on behalf of CSaP, continued by stating the evidence on which policy makers take decisions is inevitably incomplete; science alone rarely defines the policy decision. Approaches such as multi-disciplinarity and open dialogue help to identify and address uncertainties and areas of ignorance. Social scientists have a special role in helping to formulate and frame issues. Government advisers need to be skilled in the assessment and communication of risk.

Both Professor Glover and Dr Holdren focused on the importance of identifying where uncertainty occurred, communicating it honestly, and doing the most possible to reduce it through further research and analysis, while recognizing that uncertainty is intrinsic. Miles Parker took this last point into a discussion on the role of open policy making in both framing and addressing policy problems, and the skills science advisers need to help policy makers address decisions in uncertainty.

Highlights of the all sessions from the AAAS 2013 symposium can be found here.

Banner image courtesy of Jeff Gunn on Flickr