The goal of the Climate Decision Making Center is to study issues in climate and related decision making in the face of irreducible uncertainties. The Center is anchored in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Center will:

1. Develop and demonstrate methods to characterize these irreducible uncertainties, focusing on uncertainties about climate and technologies for mitigation.

2. Create, illustrate and evaluate decision strategies that incorporate such uncertainties.

3. Develop methods to examine the broad social consequences, particularly for energy systems, of choices by individual and institutional decision makers in response to climatic change or climate-rleated public policy.

This collaboration will aim to understand the role of climate-related issues in the general public policy, economic, and social environments in which decision makers operate.

The Center will develop and demonstrate a set of new decision analytic tools for addressing problems which involve high and often irreducible levels of uncertainty. In addition, it will significantly advance current understanding of the uncertainties surrounding possible future climate change and the energy technologies that may be required by climate policy. In doing this, it will work directly with and provide support to a number of decision makers for whom issues of climate are likely to be increasingly important.

The methods and approaches developed and demonstrated by this Center will have general applicability to a wide range of other problems beyond the domain of climate change and energy technology. The PhD students 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.