Climate Risk Assessment and Management
Welcome 🎯
Welcome to Climate Risk Assessment and Management, an online textbook under construction by James Doss-Gollin.
This textbook is a work in progress. Currently it’s largely a brain dump, but I am building it out incrementally for use in my own classes. As I add and organize content, I will update the chapter status codes: 🚧 (planning), 📝 (draft), ✏️ (revision), and 🎯 (ready). Contributions are welcome!
Motivation and Scope
History
This project emerged from two courses taught at Rice University by James Doss-Gollin: CEVE 543 focused on climate hazard and extremes and CEVE 421/521 focused on risk management.
Aim
The book is motivated by questions like
- What is the probability distribution of wind speeds that a building structure might experience?
- What will the probability distribution of extreme rainfall be in 2050, and what drives uncertainty in this estimate?
- What is the probability distribution of tropical cyclone losses across a regional portfolio?
- When, and how high, should a house be elevated to proactively manage future flood risk?
- What are robust, efficient, and equitable strategies for reducing flood risk in an urban area?
These questions span scales and sectors, yet they share fundamental challenges: characterizing extreme events, quantifying uncertainty, assessing risks, and making robust decisions when probability distributions are unknown or contested. Moreover, there is not a single correct answer to these questions, or a single method that will incontrovertibly answer them.
How to Use This Resource
The book is designed to be useful for practitioners, students, and teachers. Teachers may use individual chapters in their courses. Students may use it as a class text or reference. Practitioners may focus on specific chapters relevant to their work. Each chapter includes learning objectives and can be read independently, though some chapters build on concepts introduced in others.
Structure
- The Preface introduces the book’s motivation and frames key challenges
- Part 1 introduces key topics in probability, inference, Bayesian methods, optimization, machine learning, and Earth science. Rather than providing a comprehensive treatment, this part focuses on essential concepts and links to further resources.
- Part 2 focuses on hazard assessment, namely modeling climate hazards and extremes. Material is organized around thematic applications and predictive tasks. The foundational idea is integrating information from noisy and/or biased sources to estimate the joint probability distribution of relevant hydroclimatic variables.
- Part 3 risk management, which involves both mapping hazard to risk and designing interventions to manage these risks. Key ideas include the sequential nature of decisions, the pursuit of unclear and/or contested objectives, and the need to account for the sensitivity of estimated probability distributions (of hazard and of other relevant physical, social, and economic variables) to underlying models and assumptions.
- Computational notebooks written in Julia illustrate and complement the methods and concepts discussed in the text. While notebooks are referenced in the text, they are designed as standalone and self-contained resources.
Prerequisites
Basic probability and multivariate calculus, along with linear algebra, are sufficient mathematical foundations for this textbook. Some exposure to Earth science, hydrology, water resources, or related topics is strongly encouraged for context, though not strictly necessary for understanding methods. This book builds on a wide range of topics and methods in statistics, machine learning, optimization, and Earth science, and expertise in any of these areas may deepen your understanding, but is not necessary. No programming is required to read the book, but going through computational examples and applying methods to your own problems, which can substantially strengthen your understanding, does require programming.