Integrate DIFFERENT DISCIPLINES WITHIN EACH OTHER AND INTO EACH OTHER

Overview

A Nature Based Solution is judged by hydrologists, ecologists, economists, engineers, planners and lawyers, and each of them describes it in a language the others do not use. This part of the guide deals with the practical problem of making those descriptions meet: not by agreeing on a single model, but by defining what each discipline has to deliver to the others for the assessment to hold together.

Why disciplines fail to integrate

The obstacles are rarely conceptual. A hydrological model produces a time series on a grid; an economic assessment needs a loss distribution over an asset inventory; a stakeholder analysis produces a set of relationships between actors. Each is internally consistent and none is expressed in a form the others can consume directly. Where the disciplines are brought together late, the translation is done by whoever is under most pressure, and the assumptions introduced at that point are neither recorded nor tested.

A second obstacle is scale. Hydrological processes are modelled at the resolution of the terrain, economic values are held at the resolution of the administrative unit that collects them, and institutional responsibilities follow yet another geography. Reconciling them is a decision with consequences, and it has to be made explicitly rather than by whatever spatial join happens to run.

How NAIAD integrates them

The integration approach defines the interfaces first and the models second. Each work package states what it will deliver, in what units, at what resolution and with what uncertainty, and the receiving work package states what it requires. Where the two do not match, the mismatch is resolved by agreement and recorded, so that a later reader can see where a value was transformed and by how much.

The integrative modelling framework holds the pieces together as a system rather than a pipeline. It represents the catchment, the economy and the set of actors as connected components, so that a change introduced in one produces a traceable change in the others, and so that a feedback that would be invisible in a sequential assessment — an intervention that changes land use, which changes the hazard, which changes the value of the land — remains visible. System thinking is used deliberately here as an integration device rather than as a modelling fashion.

The result is applied at the demonstration areas, where the same framework is populated with different data and different disciplines take the lead depending on what the local decision requires.

Where to go next

The three children of this page take the integration problem apart. Adaptive planning deals with decisions that have to be taken before the uncertainty is resolved. Integrative modelling deals with the technical assembly of heterogeneous data. The multi-criteria decision-making toolkit deals with what to do when the criteria themselves conflict and no common unit exists in which to add them up.