The RAND Corporation has established a new Water and Climate Resilience Center (WCRC) to address one of the most significant policy challenges of our time: How do we plan, build, and organize our societal systems to become more resilient to the unavoidable impacts of climate change?
This challenge particularly affects water resources management, an area that includes freshwater supply, water quality assurance, flood risk management, and coastal planning.
Researchers working within the center will address the water management challenges by applying innovative methods and taking a systems-based approach. The center's work will support better decisions and planning by combining objective policy analysis with state-of-the-art planning support. Projects are intended to provide unique value-added to decisionmakers through
- cross-disciplinary research teams that bring together expertise across a wide range of resilience planning goals
- innovative methods to improve decisionmaking under uncertainty
- data-driven, interactive decision analysis designed to support participatory planning.
While water resources management is a primary focus of the center, WCRC will also seek to engage with and connect researchers across all of RAND who are focused on climate-related impacts and disaster resilience planning.
The new center will be co-led by David Groves, a senior policy researcher, and Jordan Fischbach, a policy researcher. For more information, contact wcrc@rand.org.
