Can Sherlock Holmes inspire us to more effective policymaking?

In our working as well as personal lives we continuously make decisions based on incomplete information. Ideally, we’d like to avoid this – we want as much information as possible - but oftentimes this isn’t feasible or practical.  Time, for instance, can be a seriously limiting factor. When Sherlock Holmes (in the guise of Benedict Cumberbatch in the recent BBC series) has to assess a situation and act, he does so in what seems like split seconds. He often starts the justification for a certain course of action with ‘On the balance of probabilities’: he admits he doesn’t know all the facts, but he has assessed options, assigned likelihoods and chosen the one that seems most plausible.

We probably all wish we had Sherlock Holmes’ paranormal ability to see. But even with bog-standard observational skills, we have over the last decades accumulated vast amounts of knowledge of the Earth’s temperature, the causes for its fluctuations and even what we can do to mitigate and adapt to the new reality of climate change. A related field which has gathered increased research momentum recently is the concept of ‘natural capital’ and how to incorporate natural assets on a country’s balance sheet. The World Bank, UNEP and the UK’s Office of National Statistics are three proponents of efforts to better account for this type of capital.

The recent paper The Wealth of Nature gives a good overview of critical questions related to natural capital. It argues for more and better measurement of natural assets, as well as more granular economic models and better institutions to implement policies. The justification for the effort to gather and register data is the accepted (business) adage that 'we cannot manage what we cannot measure'. And it is true that monetary values serve to focus thoughts and are critical in cost-benefit analyses and in recording accurate values of GDP. But gathering data should not become an excuse for inaction. There are policies that should be enacted even if we don’t have the full evidence base and where Sherlock Holmes’ rule of thumb for action suffices aplenty. This is especially true when we are faced with decisions around threshold values and tipping points; where time is critical.

I feel like a bit of a heretic saying this but while part of me agrees with the need for a rigorous approach to data collection and treatment, another part of me is shouting: don’t just collect data, do something! Climate change is a fact and there are significant diminishing returns to yet another study on the finer details of that fact. With a finite amount of attention and time, we should probably prioritise actions which we know are likely to be very good for the environment even if we don’t know the exact values.