Summary Conclusions and Guidelines

Abstract

Policy-makers are increasingly confronted with various and often seemingly diverse results from a large number of studies of environmental phenomena. Much the same holds for analysts working on more technical aspects of environmental issues. In preparing studies, the technical analyst can draw upon extensive bodies of existing work undertaken elsewhere that might contain useful information or insights. When the characteristics and results of previous studies are broadly similar, especially in terms of the problems considered and the approaches used, one question is whether this material can be systematically processed to generate comprehensive and concise conclusions that may be transferable to other areas of work. If this is so, then rather than performing an additional new in-depth study, it may be possible to elicit relevant information by looking at earlier studies dealing with similar questions.