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Panel Chair James Murley, director of the
Florida Atlantic University/Florida International University
Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems, said: "Our
panel observed ORD's experiment and found it very encouraging.
Work groups of EPA employees and others used a scanning technique
and a Delphi process to learn more about three emerging environmental
issues and then created scenarios that helped participants
explore how those issues might evolve over the next 20 years.
Even though the members of the workgroups devoted only a few
days to the experiments, the foresight techniques clearly
helped them think more critically about the issues and the
kind of research EPA might commission today to better understand
and prepare for the future."
Among the key findings:
- Foresight (or futures) analysis techniques
can help ORD's science planners with the intellectual challenge
of developing research priorities that anticipate the future.
- The revolution in information technology
is not only changing the nature of environmental problems
and opportunities, it is also making foresight analysis
increasingly straightforward to accomplish.
- With regard to maintaining a future-oriented
research program, EPA's most significant challenges are
not analytical but, rather, institutional and political:
overcoming institutional resistance to changing research
priorities and maintaining political support in EPA, the
administration, and Congress for investments that may appear
speculative or less important than responding to today's
exigencies.
- A foresight process can become an instrument
of organizational change: a means of improving the agency's
mental agility, its cohesion across disciplines and organizational
divisions, and its connection with external stakeholders.
The panel recommended that:
- ORD sponsor a second, more rigorous
test of the foresight methods described in the report to
determine how much additional insight, credibility, or impact
can be achieved by intensifying the analysis;
- ORD organize and sustain a continuous,
comprehensive scanning process; and
- provided that the scanning process and
subsequent foresight analyses continue to yield useful insights,
ORD should establish a process and funding mechanism for
commissioning follow-on research to identify and clarify
the most salient scientific questions posed by the analyses.
The report includes the panel's analysis
and some of the workgroups' products, along with an appendix
describing numerous analytical tools for foresight and how
various public and private research organizations have used
them.
Richard Minard, the Associate Director
of the Academy's Center for the Economy and the Environment,
directed the project.
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