Climate change is a systems problem. Managing climate risk requires infrastructure investments aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to changes in extreme events. These investment strategies need to account for deep uncertainty and complex dynamics across sectors and between the natural and human systems. They affect stakeholders with diverse values and preferences, and have the potential to increase equity, resilience, and justice.
Efforts to reduce these uncertainties often focus on the Earth-system components, such as future emissions or the climate response. We regularly find that other sources matter more, including how models represent human behavior, how exposure and vulnerability are characterized, and whose values are reflected in the objectives being optimized. These choices are often left implicit, and their influence is easy to overlook.
Our research group focuses on identifying which environmental and socioeconomic uncertainties are relevant for climate risk management decisions. Our interdisciplinary, mission-oriented research addresses a broad set of problems, from flood risk management to energy-system investments to climate change mitigation, and draws on tools from systems engineering, decision science, data science, and economics.
