Pardee Center

The RAND Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition was established in 2001 through a generous $5 million pledge from RAND alumnus Frederick S. Pardee. The RAND Pardee Center aims to enhance the overall future quality and condition of human life by aggressively disseminating and applying new methods for long-term policy analysis in a wide variety of policy areas where they are needed most.

The Pardee Center organizes its activities around two main themes: (1) advancing the state-of the-art in conducting long-term policy analysis so organizations can implement better long-range policy; and (2) developing and disseminating approaches that will help make proper stewardship for the future be more commonly practiced.

Identifying Key Indicators for Adaptive Management of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Integrated Resources Plan— Jun 2011
The Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District’s 2010 Integrated Resource Plan Update describes a preferred resource mix that would meet projected demand and most expected contingencies through 2035. However, recognizing that Metropolitan and the region face many significant uncertainties over the next 25 years, the Plan also describes an adaptive management approach that will monitor key trends and modify the preferred resource mix as necessary. In this project, RAND is assisting Metropolitan to determine which trends it should most usefully monitor in order to implement this adaptive management strategy.

Using RDM to Manage Climate and Other Uncertainties in EPA’s National Water Program— May 2011
RAND is undertaking a project for the EPA to determine the utility of Robust Decision Making (RDM) methods for evaluating the agency’s needs and priorities under the National Water Program. EPA may find RDM valuable because providing safe and reliable drinking water supplies and managing water quality and ecosystem health present a challenge of decision making under conditions of deep uncertainty. Maintaining safe and reliable supplies depends on timely investments in water treatment, storage, and delivery infrastructure, and the success of these investment decisions relies on predictions about water availability, system needs, and infrastructure performance many decades into the future. The project will culminate in two pilot RDM applications on NWP activities to test the applicability and usefulness of such methods for the future.

Testing the Scenario Hypothesis: The Effect of Alternative Characterizations of Uncertainty on Decision Structuring
There is much current interest in decision support approaches to help improve groups’ and individuals’ ability to make difficult decisions, such as those planners must make when considering uncertain, long-term environmental changes. This project, supported by the National Science Foundation in partnership with researchers at Columbia University, is aimed at testing the hypothesis that decision support processes that employ scenarios to characterize deep uncertainty will help contentious groups make more effective decisions than decision support processes that characterize uncertainty using a single set of best-estimate probability distributions. Testing this scenario hypothesis requires an experimental design where decision makers can augment the initial choice set by designing additional options – uncommon in judgment and decision making experiments because it can prove difficult to give subjects the flexibility to design new decision options while nonetheless working within a believable set of constraints. To address this challenge, the proposed experiments will focus on a real-world decision – managing a fishery.