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.

这项论文研究将增进目前对区域气候变化适应的理解，科学家和政策制定者日益认识到这一问题至关重要。它将整合气候学、水文学和决策分析，以解决当前关于气候变化评估中风险和风险规避重要性的争论。风险厌恶（管理事件以避免风险的愿望）在人类决策者中很常见，但迄今为止，水资源和气候变化的模型已经隐含地假设了风险中性（对风险漠不关心）。拟议的研究将把风险和风险规避纳入对气候变化影响和加州中央山谷水资源适应策略的综合评估中。分析将分四个步骤进行。首先，综合水文和水务运营模拟模型将描述加利福尼亚州中央山谷的三个盆地。其次，在多次模型运行中对合成历史天气时间序列进行重新采样（并根据缩小的 GCM 数据对其进行扰动）将生成模型中每个需求节点的供水可靠性的概率分布。第三，效用函数导出的经济技术将用于确定研究流域水组织的风险偏好。将这些效用函数与水文模型的概率输出相结合将可以估计预期效用。最后，将在不同的排放轨迹假设下分析适应预计变化的管理方案方案，以便在每个建模方案下比较每个水组织的预期效用。其结果将是比现有研究更清楚地了解影响和适应。该项目将为自然地理学和风险分析领域的水资源研究做出贡献。首先，它将对水资源规划者的普遍假设提出理论上的挑战，即未来的气候将与有记录的历史非常相似。它将产生一种方法来更清楚地阐明水管理者面临的水文风险。其次，在风险分析领域，研究将挑战水资源和气候变化文献中隐含的风险中性假设。鉴于气候变化可能会增加极端事件和供水的不确定性，当明确承认风险规避时，其预计影响可能会显着更大。通过将风险和风险规避应用于区域尺度气候影响评估，这项研究将产生一组大于各个部分之和的产品。这项研究产生的工具将直接应用于该系统和其他水资源系统。与目前加州水务运营建模工具相比，水文/水务运营模型将成为更加透明、易于使用的工具。在短期内，该模型将有助于目前无法使用此类规划工具的利益相关者进行敏感性分析。从长远来看，该模型将与其他模型连接起来，形成一个全州范围的表示，集成新的功能，包括适合气候变化评估的物理水文学的动态表示。此外，该通用工具还可应用于从环境评估到供水可靠性分析等各种主题。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将为有前途的学生建立强大的独立研究生涯提供支持。