Article | Fall 2004
New NSF-Funded Center for Research on Environmental Decisions
Decisions based on weather and climate predictions impact critical matters such as agricultural production, water supply and usage, and public health. Yet the uncertainty surrounding climate change and interannual climate variability, and the potential threats associated with it, complicate the decision making process. If we can better understand how people deal with such uncertainty, we can improve the way in which people can adapt to increased variability and change with better decision tools, including improvements in the format and delivery of climate forecasts.
To this end, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Columbia a five-year $5.9 million dollar grant to establish a new Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED). The Center will be led by David Krantz (Professor, Psychology and Statistics), Elke Weber (Professor, Management, International Business, and Psychology, Roberta Balstad (Director, Center for International Earth Science Information Network, and Kenneth Broad (Research Scientist, International Research Institute for Climate Prediction). Bridging the social and natural sciences, CRED will be a joint center of ISERP and the Earth Institute, and is affiliated with ISERP's Center for the Decision Sciences. The Center also involves researchers at universities across the country and at international sites.
This is one of five "Decision Making Under Uncertainty" awards made nationwide by NSF's Human and Social Dynamics program. The other four went to Arizona State, Carnegie-Mellon, Colorado at Boulder, and the Rand Corporation.
CRED will produce basic research on environmental decision making, drawing from recent progress in the descriptive decision sciences. As Krantz and Weber explain, individual and group decision mechanisms have generally been studied separately, the first by cognitive and social psychologists, the second by other social scientists such as sociologists or anthropologists. The new Center will integrate these different approaches, and will provide research that is based both in the laboratory and in field sites around the world.
This perspective is already providing insight into how people respond to climate variability and change. In pilot research, for instance, Weber found that farmers in Argentina systematically misremembered rainfall in recent years consistent with their perceived utility of the agronomic and economic value of rain in each year-evidence of wishful thinking or "wishful memory." With funding from NSF, the Center will mount an array of new projects ranging from climate information and water resource management in Ceará, Brazil to group discussion in Ugandan farm communities to climate change detection and behavior in Alaska.
Building on this research, the Center will develop new interventions and decision tools to improve decision making. By educating scientists, the Center's directors aim to improve the flow of information between the fields of decision making and climate change. Climate models and forecasts can provide scientific information for individuals and groups; conversely, the decision requirements of individuals and groups can inform modeling priorities and reporting formats of the climate scientists. The Center will also develop educational programming for audiences ranging from high school students to academic researchers to policy makers.
With the resources at Columbia and several partner institutions and the depth and variety of projects undertaken by CRED, the Center is positioned to become a major contributor to worldwide knowledge and understanding of decision making under conditions of climate uncertainty.
See Also
- Center for Research on Environmental Decisions
- Press release: Center for Research on Environmental Decisions Launched
