Although scientific knowledge about many dimensions of global-scale climatic change has been growing for a number of decades, many organizations are ill-prepared to address challenges posed by changing environmental conditions. Information upon which they base decisions is incomplete and sometimes erroneous, and the processes used to formulate, consider, implement, and evaluate decisions may be incomplete or lacking. This distributed interdisciplinary collaborative group will combine knowledge and research methods from behavioral and decision sciences, engineering, and natural science to assist individuals, corporations, governments, and the international community to better address many of the difficult climate decisions they now face. The group's researchers are associated with about 10 different organizations. They will address a range of topics, including decisions about reducing emissions of carbon dioxide from the energy system, decisions related to adapting to the impacts of climate change, issues that arise as a result of interactions between reducing emissions and adapting to change, and dealing with unexpectedly rapid or large changes or impacts. While addressing these climate decision problems, the group's investigators will work to identify limits to existing theory and methods and to make fundamental contributions to the development and dissemination of new frameworks, theory, and methods in the social, behavioral, and decision sciences. In order to assure that this more fundamental work occurs in a regular and systematic way, the group regularly will convene theory and methods workshops.
The group's anticipated contributions are four-fold. It will provide guidance and support for a number of key climate-related decisions. It will develop and demonstrate advanced tools and methods to support improved decision making and disseminate those new tools to decision makers and to the policy and research communities. The group will educate a cadre of high-quality interdisciplinary Ph.D. and M.S. researchers who will make future contributions in the field. Through a Teacher Professional Development Program, the group will provide large numbers of high school students across North America with the opportunity to learn with, and make use of, materials derived from the group's research. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) competition.
