Robert J. Lempert

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its partners develop implementation plans to meet water quality standards. Climate change and other key drivers may significantly affect these plans, but are often neglected due to uncertainty. This study uses two case studies to demonstrate how Robust Decision Making (RDM) can help to address future uncertainty by identifying vulnerabilities in water quality plans and suggesting appropriate responses.

This report features case studies of four industry leaders and discusses how these companies view enviromental technology investments.

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.

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.

Defense planning faces significant uncertainties. This report applies robust decision making (RDM) to the air-delivered munitions mix challenge. RDM is quantitative, decision support methodology designed to inform decisions under conditions of deep uncertainty and complexity. This proof-of-concept demonstration suggests that RDM could help defense planners make plans more robust to a wide range of hard-to-predict futures.

The first in a series exploring the elements of a national strategy for U.S. foreign policy, this book examines the most critical decisions likely to face the next president. The book covers global and regional issues and spotlights the long-term policy issues and organizational, financial, and diplomatic challenges that will confront senior U.S. officials in 2017 and beyond.

RAND researchers have conducted a successful proof-of-concept demonstration for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of two new methods for science and technology (S&T) planning. These methods--HyperForum, a facilitated Web-based collaborative exercise, conducted in a carefully crafted, information-rich, online environment, and Exploratory Modeling, a new approach to generating systematic, quantitative comparisons among alternative policy decisions without relying on imperfect predictions of the future--exploit new information technologies.