Management of Uncertainty in Environmental Problems: An Assessment of Technical Aspects and Policies

The monitoring of the environment for the purpose of arranging, verifying, and predicting the environmental variables that become extremely important for the quality of life is one of the most fruitful fields of research in the present day scientific scenario (Moussiopoulos et al, 1995; Roadknight et al, 1997; Power et al, 1997; Jung Kao et al, Cox). This chapter aims to show how innovative techniques of the types commonly referred to as " Soft Computing " methodologies can well contribute to solve difficult tasks in management of uncertainty in environmental problems. Along this vein, a particularly relevant example is related to the ability of predicting the variables that are correlated with pollution and that are most favorably represented in the framework of The " in-time " prediction of the future evolution of several quantities directly correlated with air pollution in an urban setting is the goal of this work and is what is required for urban environment protection. In turn, the prediction of a potentially dangerous event will ask for a political intervention , in order to take appropriate decisions finalized to public safety. This aspect will raise the level of complexity of the problem under study, in that it will embody both strictly scientific and political/eco-nomic variables. The chapter will present the experience carried out by the Authors in the framework of the very peculiar study case of the city of Villa San Giovanni, Italy. The presence of a high level of complexity within the analyzed data excludes the possibility that, concerning political economic decisions, mechanisms of pure transmission of effects occur , and, therefore, the prescriptive approach which characterizes the classic way to understand political economics is intuitively inadequate.