Announcements
Announcements
In the beginning of the year, the Mistra Council for Evidence-Based Environmental Management (Mistra EviEM) moved from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to SEI Stockholm. Working with colleagues at SEI brings EviEM closer to active research and provides access to a wide national and international network on research and policy.
Environmental research constantly yields new knowledge on how human beings can influence or protect the environment. Nonetheless, research findings are not always applied in practical environmental management and policy. This insight prompted the creation of EviEM in January 2012.
EviEM carries out systematic reviews of a range of environmental issues to improve Swedish environmental policy making. EviEM’s mission is the first of its kind in Sweden. In other parts of the world, too, it is only in the past few years that systematic reviews have begun to be used in environmental management.
The purpose of a systematic review is to sum up the best available research on a specific question. This is done by synthesizing the results of several existing studies. For a systematic review to be worthwhile it should focus on an issue where sufficient numbers of studies exist on the topic to provide a broad knowledge base, but where there is a need for a reliable consensus; for example where studies seemingly contradict one another or where environmental management choices need a clear evidence base.
Many stakeholders in the field of environmental management would like assessments of entire problem areas (such as x or y), but these are often too broad and the volume of research too large to allow systematic summaries and detailed overviews of all available research results. In order to review these topics in a meaningful way it is necessary to break the concerns down into specific questions of interest.
The reviews aim to clarify the ways in which various kinds of environmental management measures achieve desired effects, explore the repercussions of specific environmental impacts or describe the extent to which changes in the natural environment are due to human influence.
EviEM examines and reports on the scientific basis for such issues, but does not prescribe how the results should be used. Instead, EviEM ensures that all the reviews have clearly defined target groups, such as public agencies or other decision-makers in the environmental sector. It is usually these recipients, too, that suggest subjects for the reviews. The plan is that they should be able to put the results to use in recommendations and guidelines for practical environmental management.
During 2016 EviEM will launch four systematic reviews:
In August EviEM will host the first international Collaboration for Environmental Evidence (CEE) conference, in Stockholm.
Journal article / This systematic review examines how forest vegetation and invertebrates are affected by manipulating grazing and browsing patterns.
Journal article / This article proposes three urgently needed developments in evidence synthesis to help reviewers minimize the risk of subjective bias and maximize transparency.
Project / This project aims to facilitate a dialogue and document inputs on the ASEAN Declaration on Environmental Rights.
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