This report describes a proof-of-concept analysis using Robust Decision Making to evaluate water resource management response packages for California's Central Valley under future uncertainty. This analytic approach will be used to develop a more comprehensive analysis for the California Water Plan Update 2013.
This paper proposes a particular conceptualization of scenarios that aims to address many of the challenges faced when using scenarios to inform contentious policy debates.
Many institutions worldwide are considering how to include expectations about future sea level rise into their investment decisions regarding large capital infrastructures.
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.
Socio-economic scenarios constitute an important tool for exploring the long-term consequences of anthropogenic climate change and available response options.
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.
Geoengineering is risky, but could transform the portfolio of options for limiting future climate change. Some geoengineering approaches could prove fast acting and inexpensive and could be deployed by one or a few nations without global cooperation. This report provides an initial examination and comparison of the risks associated with alternative international approaches the United States might pursue to governing geoengineering research and deployment.
The authors present the concept of robust decision making (RDM), which draws on already-existing knowledge of practitioners to choose actions that are viable in both the short- and long-term.
This paper uses a combinatorial approach in which scenarios are created for all combinations of the technology development assumptions that underlie a smaller, representative set of scenarios.
This paper describes work helping the Inland Empire Utilities Agency (IEUA) explicitly develop adaptive policies to respond to climate change and integrating these policies into the organizations' long-range planning processes.
This article provides a concise overview of methods for analyzing policy choices that have been used in the study of long-term environmental challenges.
Climate change may impact water resources management conditions in difficult-to-predict ways. A key challenge for water managers is how to incorporate highly uncertain information about potential climate change from global models into local- and regional-scale water management models and tools to support local planning.
How could producing 25 percent of U.S. electricity and motor-vehicle transportation fuels from renewables by the year 2025 affect U.S. consumer energy expenditures and CO2 emissions? This report finds that reaching 25 percent renewables with limited impact on expenditures requires significant progress in renewable-energy technologies and biomass production. Without substantial innovation in these areas, expenditures could increase considerably.
As part of a multiyear study on climate-change decisionmaking under uncertainty, RAND researchers are helping water agencies in California better understand how climate change might affect their systems and what actions they may need to take to address this challenge. This briefing presents an analysis of how different adaptive water-management strategies may reduce the region’s vulnerability to climate change and other planning uncertainties.
As part of a multiyear study on climate-change decisionmaking under uncertainty, RAND researchers are working with water agencies in California to help them better understand how climate change might affect their systems and what actions they may need to take to address this challenge. This report documents the methods and observations used to preserve an archive of the study and provide a basis for refining the approach for future applications.
Description of a new analytic method, based on robust decisionmaking, that could be applied to water resource management in California and climate change policy questions.
This research brief describes an analytical approach developed by RAND to manage scientific uncertainty, which involves the use of computer programs to frame strategies that will work well across a wide range of plausible futures.
RAND conducted a two-year National Science Foundation-supported analysis with Southern California's Inland Empire Utilities Agency to evaluate alternative approaches for addressing climate change in long term water planning.
The authors have developed an alternative framework focused on flexibility--finding, testing and implementing policies that work well no matter what happens.
Decision-makers need to develop a climate policy acceptable to groups with many different estimates of the likelihood of alternative futures, and may tend to rely on strategies that work reasonably well instead of alternatives across a wide range of plausible scenarios. The authors agreed with a recommendation for use of ensembles of multiple scenarios to capture what is known about the long-term climate future.
