How to make decisions on complex environmental issues?

In practice, environmental analytics involves an integration of science, methods, and techniques involving a combination of computers, computational intelligence, information technology, mathematical modelling, and system science to address “real-world” environmental and sustainability problems. Effective environmental decision-making is often challenging and complex where final results often involve inherently subjective political and socio-economic facets. Furthermore, while certain environmental and sustainability decision-making specifications may be self-evident (post hoc analysis always tends to be incredibly accurate), more typical problems possess components that cannot be directly included in the underlying decision process without additional manipulation. Such decision-making is frequently further compounded by additional stochastic uncertainties. Consequently, complex “real world” sustainability problems frequently employ computational decision-making approaches to construct solutions to applications containing numerous quantitative dimensions and considerable sources of uncertainty.

We trust that the number and quality of the papers will prove to be of significant value to the many different researchers and practitioners who actively engage in applying disparate computational methodologies to sustainability analysis and environmental decision-making using simulation, optimization, and analytics. It is our sincere hope that this book will not only enlighten readers on the current state-of-the-art applications in computational sustainability, but will also serve to inspire further collaboration and cooperation on extensions to these topics. Continuing advancement on these topics is always necessary as “It is difficult to predict, especially the future” (Danish proverb often attributed to Niels Bohr) but, more to the point and borrowing from the deeply philosophical characters in the cartoon Calvin and Hobbes, “The trouble with the future is that it keeps turning into the present”.