September 29, 2012

In a climate-crazed world, how can we plan for the future?




Making decisions about how and where to invest limited resources is always difficult, especially with a group of diverse stakeholders. It’s more difficult when, as in the case of infrastructure like bridges, sea walls, and sewer systems, the effects of the decisions can extend out for decades, even centuries. And it’s more difficult still when future conditions are subject to what I discussed in a previous post as “deep uncertainty.”

Deep uncertainty involves two basic conditions. First, the models we use to anticipate future conditions produce a wide range of scenarios of equal (or indeterminate) likelihood.