Home
     Editorial
     Articles
     Opportunities
     Publications
     Upcoming Meetings
     Past Meetings
     Websites
     Fundamental Links
     View in PDF
     Previous Issues
     Subscribe
     Search
     Feedback

Editorial

Value of Value Studies

I have just returned from a meeting in another country about forecasts and other meteorological information and their value to society. It was mostly a technical meeting attended by scientists, managers of science, science students, and the like. There were a few social scientists and a slightly larger number of attendees interested in the application of scientific research to decisionmaking, usually policymaking.

Almost all presentations that explicitly referred to the value of their work stated that value in terms of economics benefit. One participant, for example, said his government was concerned only with the bottom line - that is, the financial aspects of climate information in general and forecasts specifically. Many of us who do climate-related impact assessments have fallen into the trap of trying to provide such cost-accounting numbers to meteorological services which they in turn use to justify more funding for research, observations, and especially monitoring.

But what about the ever-present but difficult-to-quantify social costs? How do you put a dollar amount on misery, loss of life, forced internal or transboundary migration, or breakup of families? How do you put a cost on inequity that often accompanies a climate- or weather-related hazard or forecast of that hazard? How do you put a cost on unwanted environmentally induced changes in agriculture? One standard fallback position, it seems to me, has been to look at the “willingness to pay” studies: what are people willing to pay for certain climate and weather services? I would imagine that such responses would be dependent on timing. By that, I mean willingness to pay is probably high during or right after the occurrence of a disaster - and perhaps very low during periods of benign weather and climate.

I felt that there was a disconnect at this meeting between what the scientists saw as value of their services to address societal needs and the actual value of those services. Are we asking the right questions to get resolution to the question of value? More importantly, are we as impact researchers preparing our findings for the wrong target audiences? Should we be intensifying our efforts to demonstrate not simply the value,

for example, of forecasts in this or that location, but to take a step back to demonstrate the value to society of undertaking value studies that go well beyond just providing a bottom-line cost or benefit ratio? Should we be educating decisionmakers in key positions, and those who advise them, about the value of socioeconomic, ethical, and equity aspects of value assessments?

Some decades ago, an American bank robber was allegedly asked when captured, “Why do you rob banks?” He answered, “Because that's where the money is.” Using his comment as an analogue, why are we so focused on selling such broad-gauged, multifaceted climate- and weather-impact studies to the meteorological community, which must in turn “sell” their recommendations (using their jargon and rationale, not ours) to those who provide them with their budgets? In the US, this might include going directly to the various departments of Interior, Commerce, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Education, etc.

The fact is that weather and climate information and services are, wittingly or unwittingly, part of a nation's formal or informal early warning strategy to protect itself from climate- and weather-related surprises and its citizens from harm. Arguments made directly by social scientists about their value studies may arguably be more credible, since they (for the most part) are not selling the value of their own disciplines to society: they work in a multidisciplinary mode and therefore are likely to have multiple sectoral or disciplinary loyalties.

This is not a statement against cost-benefit or other bottom-line quantitative economic value studies. No doubt we need them. But policymakers and society as a whole need much more than that. It is an argument for broader assessments that address aspects of costs and benefits that do not necessarily lend themselves to quantification. It is also an argument for demonstrating societal value, in its encompassing and relevant sense, to those decision- and policymakers whose decisions can make a difference in gaining financial support for such value studies directly, if we can prove that value studies have value to them, as well as to society and meteorology in general.

--Michael H. Glantz