The scale, scope, and uncertainties associated with climate change pose formidable challenges for scientists, policy makers, and citizens. Cities in arid locales around the world urgently need integrative research with a long-term perspective to provide a sound scientific basis for policy making to improve adaptive capacity in the face of climate change. The Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), which initially was established in 2004, is a boundary organization at the interface of science and policy that advances the scientific basis for water management decision making in the face of climatic uncertainty in the Phoenix metropolitan area of Arizona. This collaborative group will use additional funding to expand its already extensive interaction with the policy-making community, thus improving links between scientific knowledge and action. The investigators will develop fundamental new knowledge about decision making under uncertainty from three perspectives: climatic uncertainties, urban-system impacts, and adaptation decisions. As a boundary organization, DCDC scientists will use social science principles to develop and test a more integrated decision-support process for policy making in this complex environment. They will examine the interconnected water, energy, and land-use decisions that exist in a complex dynamic urban system under climate change. The previously developed DCDC WaterSim model will be refined to capture the scale dynamics, economic feedbacks, and distributional effects associated with climate-change decisions in the face of climate uncertainty. The DCDC collaborative group will work closely with the NSF-funded Central Arizona Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project to measure, monitor, and model tradeoffs among ecosystem services, social equity, and economic well-being.
DCDC research will produce new knowledge about individual and societal responses to climate change and the best practices for linking science and decision making to improve outcomes. New knowledge about urban-system dynamics will provide a better scientific basis for adaptation strategies to make cities less climate-sensitive, while new knowledge about effective approaches to decision making in the face of long-term environmental risk will aid in formulating approaches to developing and implementing these strategies. DCDC research will link knowledge about water supply and demand under current and future climate conditions with social science research on decision making, thereby providing an improved basis for scientists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to collaborate and to create and evaluate approaches to adaption in the face of climate change. The DCDC educational program will help educate and train the next generation of scholars who can move easily between the worlds of science and policy to improve society's ability to adapt to a changing climate. This collaborative group project is supported by the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences through its Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) competition.
