Robust Alternatives

Some researchers have recently stressed the importance of seeking robust alternatives (which are reasonably effective and acceptable over a wide range of possible futures) as a response to deep and irreducible uncertainty. Lempert and his colleagues have developed extensive approaches for modeling a wide array of strategies, future scenarios and value perspectives (Lempert book and recent RA article). Strategies are compared and ranked to identify those that are robust over these uncertainties and value perspectives, by minimizing regret in expected utility analysis as the decision criterion.

While this approach has substantial intellectual appeal, and holds the potential to provide insight in some contexts, the analytical requirements are severe. Climate adaptation also needs approaches that can be widely implemented and provide insight with current knowledge at low cost, to provide some applied help in billions of decision contexts. Here we sketch a heuristic approach that proceeds in the same underlying orientation of the work by Lempert and colleagues, but with a vastly simpler method. It compares a small number of strategies for a given decision context, on the basis of simple reasoning and judgments, to identify alternatives that appear robust and implementable in the short term, and likely adjustable to changing conditions in the longer term.

We suggest the following definitions as simple desiderata for quick comparisons to identify attractive alternatives for fostering ecological adaptive capacity. Alternatives that appear robust in the short term have the following features: current scientific knowledge suggests they will be reasonably likely to help foster ecological adaptation over a wide range of possible futures, they are relatively low cost, and they are reasonably acceptable and thus likely to be implemented. Of course, each of these terms is subject to a wide range of interpretations and nuance. Each may be judged relative to the limited alternatives at hand for specific decision context. If robust alternatives also provide opportunities for learning over time, and are flexible and reversible, they will have the important advantage of being adaptive over the longer term. Alternatives that are judged robust in the short term and adaptive in the long term are likely to contribute to ecological (and social) resilience for climate change adaptation contexts.