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.
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.
