New Paper in Earth's Future
Robust Adaptation to Multiscale Variability
My paper with David Farnham, Scott Steinschneider, and Upmanu Lall has been published in the open access journal Earth’s Future. Here’s the abstract:
The assessment and implementation of structural or financial instruments for climate risk mitigation requires projections of future climate risk over the operational life of each proposed instrument. A point often neglected in the climate adaptation literature is that the physical sources of predictability differ between projects with long and short planning periods: while historical and paleo climate records emphasize modes of variability, anthropogenic climate change is expected to alter their occurrence at longer time scales. In this paper we present a set of stylized experiments to assess the uncertainties and biases involved in estimating future climate risk over a finite future period, given a limited observational record. These experiments consider both quasi‐periodic and secular change for the underlying risk, as well as statistical models for estimating this risk from an N‐year historical record. The uncertainty of IPCC‐like future scenarios is considered through an equivalent sample size N. The relative importance of estimating the short‐ or long‐term risk extremes depends on the investment life M. Shorter design lives are preferred for situations where inter‐annual to decadal variability can be successfully identified and predicted, suggesting the importance of sequential investment strategies for adaptation.
References
News & Updates
10 Nov 20202020 Annual Meeting of the Society for Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty
Valuing Flexibility and Soft Instruments for Sequential Decision Problems
02 Jul 2020Funded Positions for Ph.D. Students
Want to tackle fundamental challenges in climate risk and adaptive infrastructure?
01 Jul 2020Excited to join Rice CEE
I'm thrilled to announce that I will join the Rice Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in January 2021
30 Jan 2020New Paper in Journal of Water Resources Management and Planning
(Editorial): Adaptation over Fatalism: Leveraging High-Impact Climate Disasters to Boost Societal Resilience
15 Jun 2019Call for Abstracts: Meeting the challenges of 21st century climate adaptation
We invite you to submit an abstract to our AGU Natural Hazards session 'Meeting the challenges of 21st century climate adaptation'