CSPC 2022

Causal Analysis is Key to Linking Science with Policy for Managing Canada's Natural Resources
L’analyse causale est essentielle pour relier la science et la politique de gestion des ressources naturelles du Canada

With escalating land use pressures and climate impacts, conservation planning and actions are becoming more urgent in Canada. Policy options assume a causal relationship between management actions and desired outcomes; however, much of the science informing resource management is observational and correlative because experiments are often infeasible or unethical. In other domains where experimental evidence is difficult to collect, "causal analysis" has been adopted to identify causal relationships from observational data, based on a set of strong assumptions and identification rules. This talk introduces causal analysis and argues for its broad implementation in natural resource research and policymaking.