A New Analytic Method for Finding Policy-Relevant Scenarios

David G. Groves, Robert J. Lempert

ResearchPublished Jun 19, 2007

Groves and Lempert describe an application of their new analytic method to the challenge of water resource management in California. Scenarios play a prominent role in policy debates over climate change, but questions continue about how best to use them. The authors describe a new analytic method, based on robust decisionmaking, for suggesting narrative scenarios that emerge naturally from a decision analytic framework. The authors identify key scenarios, those most important to the choices facing decisionmakers, and find such cases with statistical analysis of datasets created by multiple runs of computer simulation models. The resulting scenarios can communicate quantitative judgments about uncertainty. These scenarios support a well-defined decision process without the drawbacks of currently available approaches. The paper closes with observations about the strengths and weaknesses of this new approach and how it might be applied more broadly to climate change policy questions.

Reprinted with permission from Global Environmental Change, Vol. 17, No 1, 2007, pp 78-85. Copyright © 2006 by Elsevier Ltd.

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Originally published in: Global Environmental Change: Human and and Policy Dimensions, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 78-85, February 2007.

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