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.
Explores three ways that incorporating social heterogeneity derived from risk governance principles can enhance the application of decision making under deep uncertainty-based analyses of disasters.
Climate models provide one important source of information for adaptation planning, but do not contain all the information available from climate science. Expert elicitation can provide an effective supplement to climate models, as demonstrated at an in-person Climate Information Elicitation Workshop with San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in March 2019 to identify potential climate change impacts on the city's water supply system.
As part of the 2023 Coastal Master Plan, the Planning Tool was updated to use more detailed modeling data, including a structure-based asset inventory, and to respond to new CPRA planning priorities.
This interactive tool presents the results of a study that evaluated the performance of the San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District water plans — specifically, the 2015 Regional Urban Water Management Plan — under a range of future conditions. Researchers assessed whether demand for water outstripped the sustainable use of supply sources, taking into consideration future uncertainty in climate, drought, imported water supply, and water demand.
This study examines climate change and water resources management challenges facing water suppliers in drought-prone regions.
El presente estudio demuestra la utilidad del enfoque de Toma de Decisiones Robustas para evaluar la vulnerabilidad y las oportunidades de adaptación de la gestión de los recursos hídricos en Mendoza, Argentina.
Costa Rica's National Decarbonization Plan sets the ambitious goal for the country to become carbon-neutral by 2050. The authors of this report applied a novel methodology for planning under deep uncertainty to evaluate whether the benefits of the plan exceed its costs. They find that under the vast majority of plausible assumptions about the future, the plan would achieve or nearly achieve its goals and do so at a net economic benefit.
Mexico's third-largest metropolitan area, Monterrey, faces future water security challenges as the region grows. Tecnológico de Monterrey and RAND Corporation researchers used RAND's Robust Decision Making (RDM) framework to organize an analysis of long-term trends and vulnerabilities in water management in Monterrey and to help design a long-term water strategy.
