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.
RAND conducted a two-year National Science Foundation-supported analysis with Southern California's Inland Empire Utilities Agency to evaluate alternative approaches for addressing climate change in long term water planning.
The authors have developed an alternative framework focused on flexibility--finding, testing and implementing policies that work well no matter what happens.
Decision-makers need to develop a climate policy acceptable to groups with many different estimates of the likelihood of alternative futures, and may tend to rely on strategies that work reasonably well instead of alternatives across a wide range of plausible scenarios. The authors agreed with a recommendation for use of ensembles of multiple scenarios to capture what is known about the long-term climate future.
