Week 1 Readings

Required Reading

  1. Syllabus and Schedule

  2. Keller et al. (2021)

    • This review article provides an accessible overview on climate-risk management, spanning many of the topics that we will cover in the course. I will encourage you to revisit this paper throughout the term.

  3. Gregory et al. (2012)

    • This textbook chapter provides a nice overview to structuring environmental decision making problems. In my experience interacting with decision scientists at federal agencies, this textbook forms the foundation of their decision analysis knowledge base. This course will try to crosswalk between this literature and the climate-risk-management literature.

Optional Reading

I want to provide you with opportunities to go into various focus areas of Keller et al. (2021) in more detail. I don’t expect you to read all of these in detail. However, I think it will benefit you to at least read all the abstracts and choose one to read in detail that speaks to you.

More on wicked problems: Rittel & Webber (1973)

More on analyzing complex systems: Reed et al. (2022)

More on robust decision-making: Lempert (2002)

More on framing a decision analysis: Helgeson et al. (2024)

References

Gregory, R., Failing, L., Harstone, M., Long, G., McDaniels, T., & Ohlson, D. (2012). Structuring environmental management choices. In Structured decision making (pp. 1–20). Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444398557.ch1
Helgeson, C., Keller, K., Nicholas, R. E., Srikrishnan, V., Cooper, C., Smithwick, E. A. H., & Tuana, N. (2024). Integrating values to improve the relevance of climate‐risk research. Earths Future, 12(10), e2022EF003025. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022ef003025
Keller, K., Helgeson, C., & Srikrishnan, V. (2021). Climate risk management. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 49(1), 95–116. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-080320-055847
Lempert, R. J. (2002). A new decision sciences for complex systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 99 Suppl 3(Suppl 3), 7309–7313. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.082081699
Reed, P. M., Hadjimichael, A., Moss, R. H., Brelsford, C., Burleyson, C. D., Cohen, S., et al. (2022). Multisector dynamics: Advancing the science of complex adaptive human‐earth systems. Earths Future, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.1029/2021ef002621
Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sci., 4(2), 155–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01405730