Making Better Decisions When Confronted
with Deep Uncertainty About the Future
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.
Research Focus
This project has three goals:
1) conduct basic research needed to improve computer-based tools that enable decisionmakers to make better choices when confronted with deep uncertainty about the future;
2) examine the best means to represent uncertain scientific information for decisionmakers so they can act on it more effectively, whether as individuals or groups; and
3) strengthen the scientific foundations of robust decisionmaking (RDM), a promising new approach to computer-assisted support for decisionmakers facing deep uncertainty.
When the future is hard to predict with confidence, RDM helps decisionmakers identify strategies that perform well over a range of plausible futures.
Policy Areas
This project will draw on interactions with decisionmakers in two important policy areas:
1) long-term management of California water resources; and
2) design of scientific observation systems that provide actionable warning of abrupt climate change.
In addition to aiding decisionmakers in these two domains, the project will improve methods to support decisionmaking under conditions of deep uncertainty for a wide range of public and private sector decision challenges.
