Doctoral Dissertation Research: Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation in California's Central Valley: Implications of Risk and Risk Aversion for Integrated Assessment

博士论文研究：加州中央山谷的气候变化影响和适应：风险和风险规避对综合评估的影响

• 批准号: 0826103
• 负责人: W. Michael Hanemann
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-01 至 2010-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0826103&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Climate; Change

This dissertation research will improve current understandings of regional adaptation to climate change, a problem increasingly recognized as critically important by scientists and policymakers. It will integrate climatology, hydrology, and decision analysis to address a current debate about the importance of risk and risk aversion in climate change assessments. Risk aversion (the desire to manage events so as to avoid risk), is common in human decision-makers, but to date modeling of water resources and climate change have implicitly assumed risk neutrality (indifference to risk). The proposed research will incorporate risk and risk aversion into an integrated assessment of climate change impacts and adaptation strategies in water resources in California's Central Valley. The analysis will proceed in four steps. First, an integrated hydrology and water operations simulation model will describe three basins in California's Central Valley. Second, re-sampling synthetic historical weather time series (and perturbing them based on downscaled GCM data) over many model runs will generate probability distributions for water supply reliability at each demand node in the model. Third, economic techniques for utility function elicitation will be used to determine the risk preferences of water organizations in the study basins. Combining these utility functions with probabilistic output from the hydrology model will allow estimation of expected utility. Finally, scenarios of management options for adapting to projected changes will be analyzed under different assumptions of emissions trajectories, allowing for comparison of the expected utility to each water organization under each modeled scenario. The result will be a clearer understanding of impacts and adaptation than existing studies. The project will make contributions to the study of water resources in the fields of physical geography and risk analysis. First, it will take up theoretical challenges to the widespread assumptions by water planners that future climate will closely resemble that in recorded history. It will produce a method to more clearly articulate the hydrologic risks faced by water managers. Second, in the field of risk analysis, the research will challenge the implicit assumption of risk neutrality in the water resources and climate change literatures. Given that climate change will likely involve increased extreme events and uncertainty about water supply, its projected impacts will likely be significantly greater when risk aversion is explicitly acknowledged. By applying both risk and risk aversion to regional scale climate impacts assessment, this research will produce a set of products that are greater than the sum of the individual parts. The tools produced by this research will have direct application in this and other water resource systems. The hydrology/water operations model will be a more transparent, accessible tool than those that currently exist for modeling water operations in California. In the short term, the model will be useful for sensitivity analysis by stakeholders who currently lack access to such planning tools. In the longer term, the model will be connected with others to form a statewide representation that integrates new functionality, including a dynamic representation of physical hydrology appropriate for climate change assessment. Additionally, this general tool can be applied to topics ranging from environmental assessments to water supply reliability analysis. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.

这项论文研究将提高当前对气候变化的区域适应的理解，这一问题越来越被科学家和政策制定者认识到至关重要的问题。它将整合气候，水文学和决策分析，以解决有关气候变化评估中风险和风险规避的重要性的当前辩论。风险规避（管理事件以避免风险的愿望）在人类决策者中很常见，但是迄今为止，水资源建模和气候变化已隐含地假定风险中立性（与风险无关）。拟议的研究将将风险和风险规避纳入对加利福尼亚州中部山谷水资源的气候变化影响和适应策略的综合评估中。分析将分四个步骤进行。首先，综合的水文和水作战模拟模型将描述加利福尼亚中部山谷中的三个盆地。其次，在许多模型运行中，重新采样合成的历史天气时间序列（并基于缩放的GCM数据扰动它们）将在模型中的每个需求节点上生成用于供水可靠性的概率分布。第三，用于实用功能启发的经济技术将用于确定研究盆地中水组织的风险偏好。将这些效用功能与水文学模型的概率输出相结合将允许估计预期效用。最后，将在排放轨迹的不同假设下分析用于适应预计更改的管理选项的方案，从而可以在每个建模的场景下将预期效用与每个水组织的预期效用进行比较。与现有研究相比，结果将更清楚地理解影响和适应。该项目将为研究物理地理和风险分析领域的水资源研究做出贡献。首先，它将面临供水者规划者广泛假设的理论挑战，即未来的气候将在记录的历史中非常类似。它将产生一种方法，以更清楚地阐明水管理人员面临的水文风险。其次，在风险分析领域，该研究将挑战水资源和气候变化文献中风险中立性的隐含假设。鉴于气候变化可能会涉及增加的极端事件和供水的不确定性，因此，当明确承认风险厌恶时，其预计的影响可能会大大增加。通过将风险和风险规避应用于区域规模的气候影响评估，该研究将生产一组大于单个部分总和的产品。这项研究生产的工具将在此水资源系统和其他水资源系统中直接应用。与目前在加利福尼亚州建模水作业的工具相比，水文学/水作战模型将是一种更透明，可访问的工具。在短期内，该模型对于目前缺乏使用此类计划工具的利益相关者的灵敏度分析将很有用。从长远来看，该模型将与其他人联系起来，形成整合新功能的全州表示，包括适合气候变化评估的物理水文学的动态表示。此外，该一般工具可以应用于从环境评估到供水可靠性分析的主题。作为博士学位论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生能够建立强大的独立研究职业。