Environmental policies for water quality and ecosystem
management do not commonly require explicit stochastic
accounts of uncertainty and risk associated with the
quantification and prediction of waterborne pollutant loads
and abatement effects. In this study, we formulate and
investigate a possible environmental policy that does require
an explicit stochastic uncertainty account. We compare
both the environmental and economic resource allocation
performance of such an uncertainty-accounting environmental
policy with that of deterministic, risk-prone and riskaverse
environmental policies under a range of different
hypothetical, yet still possible, scenarios. The comparison
indicates that a stochastic uncertainty-accounting
policy may perform better than deterministic policies over
a range of different scenarios. Even in the absence of
reliable site-specific data, reported literature values appear
to be useful for such a stochastic account of uncertainty.