Climate change presents public and private sector decisionmakers with a fundamental quandary: how to address a potentially serious, long-term, and deeply uncertain threat. By waiting until new science and unfolding events eliminate much of the uncertainty, it may be too late for decisionmakers to act effectively. If they act without understanding the extent and contours of the problem, they risk making serious miscalculations.
RAND's work on improving decisionmaking under uncertainty has included work with several leading resource management agencies helping them to include the potential impacts of climate change in their long-term plans, including Southern California's Inland Empire Utilities Agency (IEUA), the California Department of Water Resources, the California Energy Commission, Denver Water, and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. RAND's work has also included hurricane protection and coastal restoration planning in Louisiana and flood risk mitigation for New Orleans.
Decisionmakers often seek predictions about the future to inform policy choices. But a reliance upon analytic methods that require them can prove counter-productive and sometimes dangerous in a fast-changing, complex world.
This chapter presents two case studies that demonstrate how DMDU methods, in particular Robust Decision Making (RDM) (see Chap. 2), can help develop robust long-term strategies.
As governments, organizations, businesses, and other institutions pursue deep decarbonization with the goal of reducing net human greenhouse gas emissions to zero by the second half of the 21st century, they will find risk management central to the challenge. This Perspective explores three concepts that are particularly important to the implementation of risk management for deep decarbonization -- risk governance, complexity, and robustness.
This study suggests initial ideas for managing climate uncertainty in conservation planning. Differences with previous RDM applications include focus on finer scale geography and significantly more uncertainty in the system (species response) model.
RAND evaluated potential effects of uncertain projections of demand and climate change on the ability of the Jinan Municipal Water Resources Bureau to meet its long-term water resources goals. This document describes RAND's approach and results, including development of a mathematical simulation model of the Jinan water supply system and analysis of the system's performance if new strategies and investments were to be implemented.
This report provides an independent study of how the stormwater problem in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania metropolitan region could grow with future climate, land use, or population change, and discusses potential long-term solutions using new analytical approaches developed by RAND. The analysis provides a baseline of scientific information intended to support ongoing regional coordination around stormwater management and water-quality planning.
Explores new methods to the study of international technological change and climate policy providing useful insights that can be used for designing a robust architecture of international technological cooperation for climate change mitigation.
Scenarios are widely used for long-term climate and energy analysis.
