资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

As we learned in Value of Science 102, projects and programs that produce new information can yield important societal benefits. These benefits are the improvements in outcomes that matter to people and the environment—lives saved, increased crop yields, a fishery collapse avoided—that result from making better decisions. From this basic concept, we can derive three principles of the value of information:

1. New information can yield societal benefits only if it influences a decision.
2. These benefits are likely to be largest when the information greatly reduces uncertainty and enables actionable decisions with big impacts.
3. We can quantify these benefits in socioeconomic terms by identifying the changes in decisions and outcomes associated with the improvements in information.