Big decisions with limited information
Deciding on big issues without enough information has just gotten a little bit easier. This step forward is facilitated by the release of the decisionSupport R package by the Land Health Decisions group at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), supported by the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems.
One of the main reasons why many decisions are difficult to make is that we don’t know enough to be absolutely sure about their consequences. We also don’t normally have enough time or money to collect a lot of information. But even where we’re able to ‘do the research’, some uncertainty still remains, because there are many things about the world and the future that we simply can’t know.
How can we make decisions in such an environment? Of course we can rely on our gut feeling alone, but this isn’t always acceptable. Especially for big decisions in international development, we normally expect a more robust approach, since such decisions can affect millions of people, vast areas and enormous amounts of money. Unfortunately, many of these same decisions are made in areas that are particularly data-scarce, such as rural Africa. [Read more on our partner's website]
This story is an excerpt from a post originally published on the Agroforestry World Blog. This research is carried out as part of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems’ Decision Analysis and Information Systems research theme.
Related contents
Podcast 
Blog Post 
Blog Post 
Blog Post 
