SRA-E Lisbon 2017

Adapting societies to climate variability and change is one of the greatest challenges the world faces. However, deep uncertainty about future socio-economic and climatic changes and their associated impacts makes it difficult to identify adaptation requirements and strategies. Nevertheless, adaptation planning is important to avoid potentially dangerous maladaptation, minimize negative consequences and maximise opportunities of a changing climate. In the absence of perfect foresight or reliable information about probabilities of different outcomes due to climate change, established statistical and optimization techniques are not helpful for informing decisions. Uncertainty in climatic conditions has traditionally received little attention in decision-making, but it is so large in the future that traditional approaches to infrastructure design for long term assets and investments is inadequate. In such situations, a growing body of literature indicates that Robust Decision Making (RDM) approaches or Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) approaches provide value by helping identify individual or portfolios of adaptation strategies that work reasonably well across large ranges of uncertain future conditions. There is a family of approaches incorporated within RDM or DMUU including, but not limited to, exploratory modelling, information-gap decision theory, decision scaling and dynamic adaptive pathways; they all aim to address uncertainty/severe uncertainty/deep uncertainty in future conditions. This session provides examples of these types of approaches applied to flood risk management, water resources (drought) and coastal risks.