As scientists learn more about how the environment responds to human activity, it has become an area of increasing concern to the global community. RAND research has helped inform policies and direct further studies of environmental issues, from building efficiency and natural resource management to risk management and decisionmaking in the face of deep scientific and economic uncertainties.
This article explores the differences between transnational and domestic terrorism, further differentiating by private versus government targets, to estimate the effect of exogenous catastrophic shocks on a country's level of domestic and transnational terrorism.
Producing natural gas from shale generates air pollutant emissions. RAND researchers provided a first-order estimate of air emissions, and the monetary value of the associated damages, from the extraction of shale gas in Pennsylvania.
This paper reviews the need for, use of, and demands on climate modeling to support so-called 'robust' decision frameworks, in the context of improving the contribution of climate information to effective decision making.
Federal support for health security research is heavily weighted toward preparing for bioterrorism and other biological threats, providing significantly less funding for challenges such as monster storms or attacks with conventional bombs.
Recent advances in GPS data processing have demonstrated that ground-based GPS receivers are capable of detecting ionospheric TEC perturbations caused by surface-generated Rayleigh, acoustic and gravity waves.
Socio-economic scenarios constitute an important tool for exploring the long-term consequences of anthropogenic climate change and available response options.
In this Response, the author sketches two problems with Professor Doug Kysar's argument regarding climate change litigation and effect on tort law.
Trust contributes to community resilience by the critical influence it has on the community's responses to public health recommendations before, during, and after disasters.
Probability-based estimates can have serious limitations when applied to a problem such as climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should also consider approaches to decision-making under conditions of uncertainty that do not depend on expert consensus on probabilities.
Despite extensive messaging about the importance of citizen preparedness and countless household surveys purporting to track the preparedness activities of individuals and households, the role individual Americans are being asked to play is largely based on conventional wisdom.
This paper focuses on the Wellcome Trust's African Institutions initiative, an example of the networked research capacity-building initiatives emerging in response to the need for research capacity growth.
The unusually cold conditions in Arctic winter 2010/11 that led to large stratospheric ozone loss are investigated.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) is an important social goal to mitigate climate change. A common mitigation paradigm is to consider strategy "wedges" that can be applied to different activities to achieve desired GHG reductions.
There is growing concern that climate change will lead to more frequent natural disasters that may adversely affect short- and long-term health outcomes in developing countries.
This study compares two widely used approaches for robustness analysis of decision problems: the info-gap method originally developed by Ben-Haim and the robust decision making (RDM) approach originally developed by Lempert, Popper, and Bankes.
The use of biomass for energy production has increasingly been encouraged in the United States, in part motivated by the potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions relative to fossil fuels.
This paper summarizes the additional uncertainty that is created by climate change, and reviews the tools that are available to project climate change (including downscaling techniques) and to assess and quantify the corresponding uncertainty.
A novel and important issue in contemporary security policy is the impact of natural disasters on terrorism. Natural disasters can strain a society and its government, creating vulnerabilities which terrorist groups might exploit.
Any successful response to climate change--both the challenges of limiting the magnitude of future climate change and adapting to its impacts--will clearly involve policies that evolve over time in response to new information and that are robust over a wide range of difficult-to-predict future conditions.
This paper provides a framework for incorporating uncertainty analysis specifically into estimates of the life cycle GHG emissions from the production of biomass.
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