User:Anni Hartikainen

Homework 1:

1. What is shared understanding?

• The botton line is that everyone must be able form identical pictures about the situation and options on which it is to be decided on.
• Everyone has had the chance to express their opinions / offer information, and the final understanding is shared with everyone in a written form. There is no need to agree on the opinions, but on the facts. However, opinions must also be made known in order to understand the possible disagreements.
• The shared understanding agreed on (and understood) by everyone is written down to be shared with everyone.

--# : It is not required that everyone agrees on facts either. However, facts are treated with scientific methods, which probably reduces disagreements about facts. --Jouni (talk) 11:36, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

2. What are co-creation skills?

• Co-creation skills include skills that are needed in when actually creating and managing an open decision process. The group making the decision must contain enough of these skills. Four main categories for co-creation skills are

1. Encouragement

• used to create the supportive atmosphere where participating is easier
• makes the decision process possible in operative way (maintainment, reviewing…)

2. Synthesis

• used to combine gathered information in a form that is useful and available to all possible (later) projects as well.

3. Open data

• change the available data to a form that can be used by assessment models in a useful way

4. Modelling

• used in making the assessment models; modular working, developing models and assessing uncertainties.

3. What are the properties of good assessment?

• In a good assessment information is evaluated based on different properties. Reviewing these properties can be used to evaluate different kinds of information, and can be applied to the whole decision-making or to just parts of it.
• Properties for good assessment can be categorized to three main categories (that, in total, include 9 sub-categories):

1. Quality of content : How well does the information answer the right question in a correct and specific way?

2. Applicability: How well can the information be used in real life to address the decision in question? – is it available and usable?

3. Efficiency: How resource-consuming is the assessment making process (taking into account the possible increase of efficiency in making new assessments later on)?

←# : Good! --Jouni (talk) 11:30, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Homework 3:

The PSSP-methodology is not very widely explained. It seems there is an uniform structure to follow, but how is that formulated or taken to use in different levels?

Indices are used in assessment making. Can information be organized by any index, and how are the different types of indices classified when making ovariables?

Homework 9:

Group: Anni Hartikainen, Mari Malinen, Michael Assibey

Comparison of assessments

• no access to detailed data of buildings in Basel
• Kuopio and Basel had information about renovations
• Helsinki and Kuopio: no data about emission locations/heights

• Helsinki: what to do with lamp types?

How to model buildings in Helsinki?

To create the ovariables we can use the data we will get from Helsinki.

Ovariable: Buildings

• Effective floor area of buildings by building type.

• type of housing

• Total energy demand by energy type and building type.
• Changes in energy efficiency of different energy sinks.

• missing: no construction/renovation data (like in Kuopio)

Ovariable: heatingEnergy

• Buildings (from above)
• energyUse: Existing situation of important energy parametres in the building stock.
• Total energy demand by energy type and building type.
• Shares of different energy sinks by building type.
• Changes in energy efficiency of different energy sinks.
• Important energy parameters.

Ovariable: emissions

• heatingEnergy (from above)
• needed: information about fuel shares
• emissionFactors: E.g. Emission factors for burning processes

Ovariable: exposure

• emissions (from above)
• population (missing)

Homework 10

To evaluate the draft assessments done earlier, I used the frameworks of Open policy practice.

Evalution of Climate change policies (HW4 by Oluwatobi Abayomi Badejo et al)

This assessment concerned the frameworks for mitigation and adaptation in response to climate change in Lagos, Nigeria. Effect and needs to adapt and mitigate the changing climate, and also the impacts of different mitigation and adaptation strategies

Characterization of assessment

Category		Characterization
Impacts		Positive impact on environmental (protection from climate change) and health (minimizing the adverse effects ). Also the impacts on economy, such as diversification of economies), are looked at. Opinions of populace will also be influenced.
Causes		Climate change, and the changes it inflicts (for example change in education will bring on different mindsets).
Problem owner		Assessment is conducted by government authorities, corporations, and communities. All parties should have an interest to make decisions, as they all will be affected by the impacts. However, the power to act on the issue lies mainly on policy makers and business owners.
Target		Intended users of the results are the policy makers, businesses, and populace. They will use the results to plan their daily activities in environmentally friendly way.
Interaction		All parties might not be similarly included (or their roles are not fully explained). Assessment will be needed in making use of the results, and it will continue assessing the use of the results and development of situation.
Category of interaction within the knowledge-policy interaction framework.		Participatory
Dimensions of openness	Scope of participation	Whole society, from citizen to government and businesses.
	Access to information	All parties probably do not have equal access to all information. Depends on how informative and willing to be open the businesses and government are.
	Timing of openness	2 years period for the development in whole, reviews in every three years. Not clearly stated when different participants will have change to participate.
	Scope of contribution	Not clearly stated, but participants will most likely have different parts.
	Impact of contribution	Contributions of populace will be tied in with government contributions. This might weaken their influence.

Evaluation of the assessment

Category		Evaluation (on scale 1 to 5)	Reasoning
Quality of content - Specificity, exactness and correctness of information. Correspondence between questions and answers.		2	Information is correct, but not very exact. Framework is sketched, but could be specified further.
Applicability	Relevance: Correspondence between output and its intended use.	2	Output can be used in the intended way. As this is a draft of assessment, very specific result can not be given. However, possible guidelines or instructions to users could have been given to show how the assessment might be utilized. Also, the result of assessment will not be very useful if the realities of community make the fight against climate change difficult.
	Availability: Accessibility of the output to users in terms of e.g. time, location, extent of information, extent of users.	3	As hinted in the assessment, the realities of Nigerian community makes it difficult to make it achievable to all.
	Usability: Potential of the information in the output to generate understanding among its user(s) about the topic of assessment.	3	Creating the framework would help in finding out the means to act. The reviewing of policy will be important in future. The interest of all the people, even those living in poverty, will be hard to rise. Not much information in the output as it is.
	Acceptability: Potential of the output being accepted by its users. Fundamentally a matter of its making and delivery, not its information content.	4	State level climate change activities should be possible, as the state is closely tied in with the assessment itself.The framework would probably be accepted, if the economical situation allows it. This will probably be problematic in reality. Output takes into account the real situation, so the policy is based on the real possibilities - not necessarily the optimal case. This enhances the acceptability.
Efficiency		3	Lot of effort would be needed to make a thorough assessment. The continuous reviewing will drain the resources. Education and development of social protection should probably be improved in any case. However, an assessment is needed to understand which actions might play the largest roles.

Suggestions to improve the draft

Examples of priority adaption action areas could be given. Specification of participants and their roles.

Evaluation of Dust storm in south of Iran causes lots of environmental impacts and health problems for the country (by Mohammad Shahidehnia and Paula Maatela)

Characterization of assessment

Category		Characterization
Impacts		Impacts on health, economy, contentment of citizens and value of properties is looked at. Most important section in this assessment are the health impacts.
Causes		Dust storms and other particular pollutants.
Problem owner		All citizens of Ahvaz are affected by the impacts. Decision makers have the biggest responsibility, and will also have the most power in taking action. Draft assessment was conducted by Paula Maatela and Mohammad Shahidehnia.
Target		Decision makers, Ahvaz city inhabitants. Planning and Development Assistance in Ahvaz. Iran and Iraq.
Interaction		According to the draft assessment all parties will be allowed to participate. However, if understood correctly, the decision makers will only hear the results from the municipality of the city. Not clear about the extent of participation of different users.
Category of interaction within the knowledge-policy interaction framework.		Participatory/Joint
Dimensions of openness	Scope of participation	All parties from citizens to state government.
	Access to information	Information about health effects and the level of pollution.
	Timing of openness	From present to 2030. Not specified whether different participants participate have the same time frame in participation.
	Scope of contribution	Depends of participants. To solve the problem of pollution all participant should find the best ways for them to contribute. This depends of participants, citizens have different possibilities compared to government.
	Impact of contribution	The outcome seems to be based on research results. Participants play larger role in performing of the actions based on outcomes.

Evaluation of the assessment

Category		Evaluation	Reasoning
Quality of content		2	The question - whether or not it is right to have pollutants - is not really answered, just stated that the citizens should be protected from the state of environment. Information leading to this is specific and correct.
Applicability	Relevance	3	The results can be used in demonstrating the bad situation and its consequences to decision makers. In my opinion the assessment question could be improved.
	Availability.	3	It seems that there is a will to make results available to all parties. In reality this might prove problematic.
	Usability	3	Understanding the information might be hard for some users (at least terminology should be explained). However, I beleive that general understanding about the topic would be achieved.
	Acceptability	4	The output is probably easily accepted by the users. The problems of air pollution should be previously well known by all citizens.
Efficiency		3	Based on previous studies, the importance of air pollution is easily stated. To come up with best results to decrease the risks would take way more time. Righteousness, on other hand, is hard to debate on.

Suggestions to improve the draft

Make sure that the assessment question is about what it is supposed to be. Explaining the terms to make them more understandable to everyone, even typical citizens.