Climate Decision-Making

Climate and environmental monitoring for decision making

As human populations grow, so do the resource demands imposed on ecosystems and the impacts of our global footprint. Natural resources are not invulnerable, nor infinitely available. The environmental impacts of anthropogenic actions are becoming more apparent – air and water quality are increasingly compromised, pests and diseases are extending beyond their historical boundaries, and deforesta...

Decision making under uncertainty and learning about climate change

Validity of Climate Change Forecasting for Public Policy Decision Making

Policymakers need to know whether prediction is possible and if so whether any proposed forecasting method will provide forecasts that are substantively more accurate than those from the relevant benchmark method. Inspection of global temperature data suggests that it is subject to irregular variations on all relevant time scales and that variations during the late 1900s were not unusual. In su...

Decision making in nonlinear and uncertain climate systems

We use an integrated assessment model to explore some mechanisms affecting decision making in coupled climate-economic systems with uncertainty. Using stochastic variants of the classic DICE model we compare optimal decisions in a single, known state of the world to decisions across varied states with either perfect information, total uncertainty, or learning. Learning is the most realistic cas...

Dangerous news: media decision making about climate change risk.

This article explores the role of broadcast news media decision makers in shaping public understanding and debate of climate change risks. It locates the media within a "tangled web" of communication and debate between sources, media, and publics. The article draws on new qualitative research in the British context. The main body of it focuses on media source strategies, on climate change story...