Environmental information - A step to knowledge and understanding : Opening comments.
At a time when information and knowledge about the environment and the economy are increasing, problems of both environment and economy are growing more serious. It is the role and opportunity of a university institute concerned with research on environment and economy to convert information about the environment into knowledge, and to explore applications of that knowledge in areas of economic management and policy. The main barriers to production and dissemination of information that can contribute to effective environmental knowledge are those that affect the reliability, adequacy, accessibility, and understandability of environmental information. Such barriers may be systematic, biasing the gathering of information and selecting in advance who may benefit from it; they may be barriers of translation, with distortion of content or significance; barriers of sophistication, that determine both content and context; or, most difficult in the environmental field, barriers imposed by problems of scale and relationships of different scales. To be useful, information cannot be purely objective, but must have subjective value added. There is a staircase of 'knowing', progressing from Observation and Measurement, to Data, to Information, to Knowledge, to Understanding, and finally to Wisdom, presenting increasing barriers of subjective value, interpretation, and integration at each step.
Department of Environment, Canada.
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