Debra Knopman

The Air Force has long faced a challenge integrating force design and capability development planning with programming. RAND Project Air Force assisted the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability (AFWIC) in conceptualizing analytical and other products to support concept development, force design options, and capability development planning. The authors present findings and recommendations for AFWIC's analytical processes and products.

For the purposes of capability development planning, RAND Project AIR FORCE focuses on analytical methods that can be used for decisionmaking under conditions of deep uncertainty about the future threat environment, rate of technological advancement, and budgeting. Such methods can also inform investment trades across warfighting domains and functional areas, as well as other responsibilities of the Air Force Warfighting Integration Capability.

RAND evaluated potential effects of uncertain projections of demand and climate change on the ability of the Jinan Municipal Water Resources Bureau to meet its long-term water resources goals. This document describes RAND's approach and results, including development of a mathematical simulation model of the Jinan water supply system and analysis of the system's performance if new strategies and investments were to be implemented.

Nuclear power is receiving renewed interest because of its low greenhouse gas emissions. However, if nuclear power is to be sustainable option for the United States, methods for managing spent fuel that meet stringent safety and environmental standards must be implemented. This report examines technical and institutional approaches to spent fuel management and highlights policy implications of pursuing alternative strategies.

Based on the premise that investing in hazard risk mitigation will reduce spending on recovery and response, the federal Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program recognizes that equity issues are important in helping communities? mitigation efforts. Researchers identified ways to address these issues while enhancing the accuracy of natural hazard assessment in future BRIC grant decisionmaking, as described in this report.

Florida's Miami-Dade and Broward counties are vulnerable to flooding and intrusion of saltwater into drinking water wells as a consequence of sea level rise, changes in precipitation, and the distribution of future asset growth across the region. The authors developed an integrated groundwater and economic model and decision support tool to help regional planners and decisionmakers focus mitigation actions on the most vulnerable areas.

Passenger air travel is at an all-time high. A key question for Congress is whether current levels of spending will be sufficient under existing federal policies to enable commercial service airports to make appropriate and timely infrastructure investments to meet future demand. This report contains a comprehensive review of the role of the federal government in airport infrastructure funding and financing.

This project implemented a participatory process with key stakeholders to evaluate current and potential future resilience-related investments in Jamaica Bay. The process was designed to consider baywide concepts that could reduce future flood risk exposure while also improving water quality, restoring habitat in and around the bay, and more generally improving resilience to extreme weather events.

Air Force mission success is increasingly dependent on assured access to electricity. A number of factors can interrupt supply of electric power, including natural disasters, accidents, and deliberate interference. The authors present a framework to assess energy assurance at Air Force installations.

This report summarizes the literature on definitions of resilience to flood risk, conceptual system-of-systems frameworks to analyze resilience, metric and indicator systems for measuring resilience, and examples of resilience-building in action at the community level. It also catalogs decision support tools for flood mitigation and provides examples of their use. Finally, it makes recommendations for further investigation of the tools.

This report presents a decisionmaking framework and supporting indicators to guide urban responses to climate change based on principles of risk governance, along with considerations of institutional arrangements and their economic and social context. The framework emphasizes identification of indicators of capacities and processes to implement, adapt, and transform policies, institutions, financing, and other actions to affect change.

This report is the last of a six-volume series in which RAND explores the elements of a national strategy for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. It analyzes U.S. strengths and weaknesses, and suggests adaptations for this new era of turbulence and uncertainty. The report offers three alternative strategic concepts and evaluates their underlying assumptions, costs, risks, and constraints.

RAND researchers developed a framework and metrics for examining vulnerabilities, opportunities, and risks to U.S. transmission, storage, and distribution (TS&D) systems through 2030 under a range of uncertainties. They assessed major stresses on and opportunities in three TS&D systems: oil and refined-oil products, electric power, and natural gas. They also considered the resilience that these systems have to short-term shocks and disruptions.

This report proposes a system of quality of life indicators and identifies policy options to advance sustainability in the Pearl River Delta, a region of Guangdong Province in southeastern China. The report focuses on land use and transportation goals and strategies, with additional analysis of policies related to the environment, housing, and economic development.

To ensure that federal agencies incorporate key principles of resilience into their formulation, evaluation, and prioritization of infrastructure investments related to Sandy rebuilding, the Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force developed its Infrastructure Resilience Guidelines. RAND researchers conducted an initial assessment of federal agencies implementation of the guidelines to identify the main opportunities and challenges."

This report highlights RAND s contributions to the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority s Master Plan. Its purpose is to help policymakers in other coastal regions understand the value of a solid technical foundation to support decision-making on strategies to reduce flood risk, rebuild or restore coastal environments, and increase the resilience of developed coastal regions."

The 2012 Colorado River Basin Study evaluated the resiliency of the Colorado River system over the next 50 years to climate change and other factors, and then compared different options and strategies for ensuring successful management of the river s resources. This report describes RAND s contribution to this study. It focuses on the Robust Decision Making methodologies used to identify vulnerabilities and compare portfolios of options."

Identifies and assesses obstacles to disposing of excess Army lands that contain unexploded ordnance, and identifies innovative options for the disposal of these lands; In the ongoing Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, lands containing unexploded ordnance (UXO) left over from military training have proved particularly difficult and costly to transfer to new users. With a few exceptions, little progress has been made in transferring these lands. This monograph chronicles both the issues that facilitated the transfer of UXO-contaminated lands and those that slowed the transfer, and it offers options for expediting the transfer of these lands.