Environmental decision-making using Bayesian networks: creating an environmental report card

Abstract

Environmental report cards are popular mechanisms for summarising the overall status of an environmental system of interest. This paper describes the development of such a report card in the context of a study for Gladstone Harbour in Queensland, Australia. The harbour is within the World Heritage-protected Great Barrier Reef and is the location of major industrial development, hence the interest in developing a way of reporting its health in a statistically valid, transparent and sustainable manner. A Bayesian network (BN) approach was used because of its ability to aggregate and integrate different sources of information, provide probabilistic estimates of interest and update these estimat..