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.
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.
