CDMC

How much will global temperatures rise in the next 50 years? What about sea level? Will there be more tropical storms and habitat loss? Climate researchers have been tackling these questions for decades now, but the uncertainty in climate change remains, and is likely to remain even with more research. If policy makers are to do anything about global warming, they will have to make decisions now, in spite of the uncertainty. At the Climate Decision Making Center, researchers are studying the limits in our understanding of climate change and its impacts. They are developing and demonstrating methods to characterize these irreducible uncertainties, focusing on uncertainties about climate and technologies for mitigation. They will also create, illustrate and evaluate decision strategies and tools for policy makers that incorporate such uncertainties. The center's research focuses on the real-world problems of the following stakeholder groups:

Insurance managers who face financial risks from climate change and low-carbon technologies;
Forest, fisheries and ecosystem managers in the Pacific Northwest and Canada;
Arctic-region decision makers trying to balance cultural lifestyles with modern economic development;
Electric utility managers facing large capital-investment decisions in the face of climate risks.

In addition, the center will advance the current understanding of the new low or zero-carbon energy technologies that may be required by climate policy.
The Climate Decision Making Center is anchored at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Engineering and Public Policy. It was founded in 2004 with a five-year, $6.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Researchers at the center will work directly with and provide support to a number of decision makers for who issues of climate are likely to be increasingly important. The methods and approaches developed and demonstrated by the researchers can be applied to a wide range of problems beyond the domain of climate change and energy technology. The Ph.D. students that the center will educate will combine strong technical, social science, and decision-analytic skills which will prepare them to work on a wide variety of important societal problems.