Mark Burgman is Director of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Conservation Biology. He is author of Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts. Previously, he was Adrienne Clarke Chair of Botany at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He works on expert judgement, ecological modelling, conservation biology and risk assessment. He has written models for biosecurity, medicine regulation, marine fisheries, forestry, irrigation, electrical power utilities, mining, and national park planning. He received a BSc from the University of New South Wales, an MSc from Macquarie University, Sydney, and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He worked as a consultant ecologist and research scientist in Australia, the United States and Switzerland during the 1980’s before joining the University of Melbourne in 1990. He joined CEP in February, 2017. He has published over two hundred and fifty refereed papers and book chapters and seven authored books. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2006.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
Your book Trusting Judgements: How to Get the Best Out of Experts really challenges a lot of the assumptions we make as a society and the decision makers in government and industry. As an expert in risk analysis and environmental policy, what have you learned about how to get the best out of experts and communicating to them in the language that achieves results? And how we can prioritize the areas that require the most urgent attention?
MARK BURGMAN
The idea of expertise and expert judgment has been around and has been something that society depends upon for a long time, but there have been no serious empirical explorations of who's an expert, what a domain of expertise is, and what sort of frailties are experts susceptible to.
Those things haven't been addressed in an empirical way until the last 30 years. Some of this work began in the fifties with Kahneman and Tversky. They began to explore the things that make people misjudge risky situations, and that led to a body of research on who makes good judgments and under what circumstances for things that might affect us in various ways. But these were typically judgments about the probabilities of events and the magnitudes of the consequences. There's a domain in which we use experts to make judgments about future events, the quantities of things that we will see at some time in the future, or things that currently exist, but we don't know what they are. We don't have time yet, to compile the data that we need, and we rely on expert judgments in law courts, but also relied on them for example, we have a new disease like COVID, and we didn't know yet its transmission rates and yet we have to guess at its transmission rates to make judgments about how best to manage the population to protect ourselves. And we rely on expert judgments of all of those circumstances. And yet we don't know who the best expert is. Who should we ask? Is it the best-credentialed person? Is it the person that most people trust? If you ask two experts and you get two opinions, which one should you use? And so on and so forth.
Now, that has been the focus of research over the last 10 or 15 years, and I've learned some really important things that run contrary to our intuition about some of those things.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
And speaking of conservation biology, you are the editor of Conservation Biology. Tell us about your work there.
BURGMAN
I am the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Conservation Biology. It is the original journal for the Society for Conservation Biology, which was established in the United States in the 1980s. And the journal was created to provide a home with substantive scientific advances that form the basis for the underpinnings of action and conservation science. So we try and provide the techniques, the procedures, and the scientific experiments that underpin the actions we take to conserve biodiversity globally. It's been running since June 1985, and I've been the editor for 12 years. We receive between 900 and 1,000 papers a year. We publish about 150 or 200 of those. The topics are tremendously variable. They range from straight ecology through mathematical modeling to the psychology of human behavior and the ethics of trophy hunting, and everything in between. And so, it's a wonderfully diverse and interesting journal to read.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST
We are living in the century of the city and I know that one of your areas of focus is the replicability of solutions. So when you think of the scale of the cities and what they can do in terms of tackling climate change…cities are the main drivers of creativity and innovation and consume 75% of the world's natural resources and account for 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions. So what do you think the cities of the future are going to look like in terms of energy transport, resource waste management, food pollution?
BURGMAN
In the context of cities, I think it's tough to answer. We hope that cities will become more sustainable. We hope that people living in cities will reduce their consumption of carbon-emitting fuels, but there is no global indication that the momentum in that direction is increasing appreciatively. The growth of the middle classes in large, developing economies of the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the information that I have is that the consumption practices in those environments, cultures, and places are going to accelerate.
It's not going to decelerate over the next 20 or 30 years. And that generates a large amount of momentum. There are going to be a great many new cities over the next 50 years. Hundreds and hundreds of cities that have more than a million people. We hope that the development of those cities will be built around sustainable practices, but that's an optimistic view.
Actually, we are living in a miracle. It's not elsewhere, but it's this planet, and we have to do what we can to honor the balance of life on this planet and not do everything that we can to destroy it, but to preserve and protect it. You know? What for you are some of those things that remind you of the beauty and wonder of the natural world?
BURGMAN
You know, I'm not a spiritual person, but I think I'm a walking advertisement for what's called existence value. We clear land skill today globally at a rate that exceeds the imagination. And we are all wondering the same thing about our threatened species, and so we did some experiments and that's when we found that asking the best-regarded person is a mistake. You don't ask them. They're usually overconfident, and they know more than a random person from the street. But if you are interested and you understand the data and the jargon, then your judgment will be as good as anyone else's. And then I've got a much wider pool of people. I can go to people who are interested than people who profess knowledge and insights. Get them together, talk to them, facilitate the discussion in a structured way, and generate an answer. And that's, we did that because we were interested in conservation problems, but it has implications for expert judgment in epidemiology, medicine, dentistry, social security, national security, and geopolitics. These same questions and these same constraints arise. And so the results of that work are much more generally useful than just conservation.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Tori Garfield with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Tori Garfield.
Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
