Towards Data-Driven Environmental Planning and Policy Design - Leveraging Fuzzy Logic to Operationalize a Planning Framework

Environmental planning is complex, and requires careful consideration of a large number of factors, including quantitative ones (e.g., water balance) and qualitative ones (e.g., heterogeneous stakeholder input). To better integrate these factors, value-driven frameworks have been designed in the environmental conservation community. These frameworks are currently largely utilized manually by conservation and policy experts in order to inform policy design. In this paper, we present a fuzzy logic based system, which has been developed to operationalize the existing manual framework while preserving essential qualities, including the capture of uncertainty in the data sources and a consistent interpretability of the underlying automatic reasoning mechanisms. We provide a detailed description of the current implementation which can be applied in the operationalization of policy design and planning tasks in a range of natural resources management cases, followed by a set of concrete, practical outputs for a studied use case in Western Australia. Finally, we highlight remaining limitations and future work.