Pardee Center Speaker Series and Events

A New Approach to Scenarios for the IPCC

Ms. Julie Rozenberg, Centre International pour l'Environnement et le Développement (CIRED), Paris, France

Santa Monica, CA

April 26, 2012

The scientific community is now developing a new set of scenarios, referred to as Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) to replace the IPCC SRES Scenarios, which have been used in numerous studies over the last decade. To be used to investigate adaptation and mitigation, the new SSPs need to be contrasted along two axes: the capacity to mitigate, and the capacity to adapt. This talk described the current SSP process and proposed a methodology to develop these SSPs using a "backward" approach. The methodology is based on (i) an a priori identification of potential drivers of mitigation and adaptation capacity; (ii) a modelling exercise to transform these drivers into a large set of scenarios; (iii) an a posteriori selection of a few SSPs among these scenarios, such that they cover the uncertainty space in terms of capacity to adapt and mitigate.

Many-Objective Visual Analytics: Participatory Decision Support in Water Resources and Beyond

Dr. Patrick Reed, The Pennsylvania State University, with
Joe Kasprzyk, The Pennsylvania State University, 
and Shanthi Nataraj, RAND

Santa Monica, CA

February 10, 2012

In this talk, Dr. Patrick Reed presented an advanced visual analytical framework to aid decision makers in efficiently exploring and assessing complex, high dimensional Pareto approximate solution sets. Beyond the framework's advanced decision support features, it also provides tools to visualize search dynamics and convergence in both serial and parallel computing contexts. He demonstrated the framework by showing examples drawn from space-time groundwater monitoring network design, surface water model calibration, and urban water portfolio planning applications.

Following Dr. Reed's presentation, Nataraj and Kasprzyk discussed a new interactive framework that combines robust decision making (RDM) with many objective optimization using evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) to confront deep uncertainty for water planning on which they have been collaborating. The framework was demonstrated using a case study that examines a single city's water supply in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) in Texas, USA.

No Captain at the Helm: The Network Structure of Global Political Economy

Hilton L. Root, Professor of Public Policy, George Mason University

Washington, DC

December 2, 2011

One of the key questions to be asked in the context of growing global interconnectedness is whether the global system will be stable as parts of the system are altered. How will system-level properties be affected by the changes taking place in what was once the periphery, in China, the Middle East, and the second world in general? The behavior of China or of Islamic nations mattered little when they operated in relative isolation from the larger system, but in a truly interdependent system, divergent components can alter the behavior of the system as a whole.

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program: Overview of Climate Change Results

Linda O. Mearns, Director, Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences
, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

Santa Monica, CA

November 11, 2011

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) is an international program that is serving the climate scenario needs of the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico. We are systematically investigating the uncertainties in regional scale projections of future climate and producing high resolution climate change scenarios using multiple regional climate models (RCMs) and multiple global model responses by nesting the RCMs within atmosphere ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) forced with a medium-high emissions scenario, over a domain covering the conterminous US, northern Mexico, and most of Canada. In this overview talk, results from the various climate change experiments for various subregions, along with measures of uncertainty, were presented.

Global Water Leadership: New Partnerships for Innovation and Sustainability

Mr. Tim Brick, Board Member And Former Chairman of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California

Santa Monica, CA

July 27, 2011

What is the future for water management in Southern California? This talk addressed the current challenges for water managers in Southern California, and highlighted the issues that decision makers will face in the near- and longer-term future. Tim Brick argued that Southern California has the potential to be a global leader in the development of cutting edge technologies and approaches to water management for countries around the world.

Decision-Scaling and Robust Adaptation in Large Water Resource Systems

Dr. Casey Brown, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Santa Monica, CA

May 23, 2011

The projected impacts of climate change have extraordinary implications for many water resource systems. There is increasing recognition of the importance of robust responses to these challenges. But there is lack of an accepted framework for incorporating climate information, with its inherent uncertainties and limitations, into the decision making and policy processes of most institutions. We describe a decision analysis framework––called decision scaling––for the use of uncertain climate information for planning in water resources systems. The approach is applied for climate risk assessment and for the design of robust adaptation.