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New Methods for Identifying Robust Long-Term Water Resources Management Strategies for California
Ensuring sufficient, high-quality water supplies for California over the next several decades will be a great challenge for water resource managers. Choosing an appropriate management response using standard methods will be extremely difficult and contentious because the scope and magnitude of these impacts are highly uncertain and stakeholders have diverse views about desirable outcomes. This dissertation first documents the development and use of a model to generate quantitative scenarios of future water demand in California. It next describes a new analytic method for decisionmaking under deep uncertainty called Robust Decision Making (RDM). To demonstrate how RDM can be a valuable analytic tool for California long-term water planning, the dissertation applies the methodology to a stylized representation of the water supply and demand management challenge facing Southern California.
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Contents
Chapter One:
Introduction
Chapter Two:
California’s Water Resources and Future Challenges
Chapter Three:
Standard Decision Theory and its Limitations for Long-term Water Resource Planning
Chapter Four:
Scenarios Of Future California Water Demand
Chapter Five:
A New Analytic Method For Identifying Robust Policies
Chapter Six:
Robust Water Management Strategies for Southern California
Chapter Seven:
Summary and Key Insights
Appendix One:
Additional Water Demand Scenario Results
This document was submitted as a dissertation in September, 2005 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in public policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. The faculty committee that supervised and approved the dissertation consisted of Mark Bernstein (Chair), Robert Lempert, Debra Knopman, and Lloyd Dixon.
Financial support for this dissertation was provided by the Rothenberg Family and the National Science Foundation.
This product is part of the Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS) dissertation series. PRGS dissertations are produced by graduate fellows of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, the world's leading producer of Ph.D.'s in policy analysis. The dissertation has been supervised, reviewed, and approved by a PRGS faculty committee overseeing the dissertation.
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