W11: Scenario Development and Analysis For Integrated Environmental Assessment Studies

Organizers: Thorsten Wagener (Pennsylvania State University), Yuqiong Liu (SAHRA/University of Arizona), Steve Stewart (SAHRA/University of Arizona), Holly Hartmann (CLIMAS/SAHRA)

Goals:

Background:

The development of strategies for water resources planning and management and the assessment of impacts of potential environmental change are often guided by analyzing multiple future scenarios within an Integrated Modeling (IM) framework, usually driven by forcing derived from global climate models and/or possible future socio-economic changes. The process of scenario development involves making explicit and/or implicit assumptions about potential future conditions, such as climate change, land cover and land use changes (e.g. urbanization), population growth, economic development, and technological change. These scenarios generally surpass forcing or behavior that has been observed in the past. Realistic assessment of scenario impacts requires complex modeling frameworks that represent environmental and socio-economic systems to the best of our knowledge, including assumptions about probabilities of the occurrence of future conditions. In addition, scenarios have to be developed in a context relevant to the stakeholders involved, to facilitate transparency of scenario results, and to establish credibility and relevance of the results among them. Hence, for the IA models to be useful for policy making, appropriate scenarios have to be carefully constructed and associated uncertainties propagated into the model outputs have to be understood and quantified. Relevant questions for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

Question:

• What is the role of scenarios in IA? What are the main characteristics of environmental IA scenarios? In how far can we use the past (e.g. climate) as a guide to potential future scenarios? How can we assign probabilities to future scenarios?
• How to develop appropriate scenarios for environmental IA studies? How can (often non-technical) stakeholders and decision makers interact with complex modeling systems in the process of scenario development and analysis?
• How to establish credibility and relevance of the scenarios and the underlying IA modeling framework among stakeholders and decision makers? How can we combine general expert knowledge with local knowledge in this context?
• How to communicate uncertain scenario results to stakeholders and decision makers? What are approaches to estimate, propagate and visualize scenario uncertainty within IA modeling frameworks?
• How to evaluate scenario results for their credibility if no observations are available? How to evaluate the likelihood that available models are capable of representing extreme (environmental/socio-economic) system behavior?
• How can we build IA frameworks that are sufficiently realistic (and therefore necessarily complex) while being transparent and flexible at the same time? What is the role of parsimonious models in this context?
• How to coordinate scenarios across multiple spatial scales and multiple models, from scientific and stakeholder perspectives?
• How to coordinate scenarios with historical analysis and previous scenario assessments?
• What role do decision science tools (e.g., game theory, decision analysis) have in scenario analysis and applications?

Go To Workshop Blog

Position Paper
T. Wagener, Y. Liu, S. Stewart, H. Hartman and M. Mahmoud	Imagine - Scenario Development for Environmental Impact Assessment Studies
Invited Speakers (Tuesday, June 11, 14:15 - 15:15)
Roger B. Street (Technical Director, UKCIP), Michelle Colley and Richard Westaway (UK Climate Impacts Programme, Oxford University Centre for the Environment (UKCIP), Oxford, UK (www.ukcip.org.uk))	Climate and Socio-economic Scenarios: Lessons Learned Through Stakeholder Engagement and Use
Larry Winter (Deputy Director, NCAR Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geoscience, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO 80305)	Comparing Scenarios Through Model Output
Steven Stewart with Holly Hartmann, Yuqiong Liu, Thorsten Wagener, Mohammed Mahmoud	Scenario development for semi-arid regions: a multi-disciplinary example
Participants
Thania Rendon, Miquel Sanchez-Marre	Multi-Agent systems to simulate scenarios for decision-making in river basin systems
George Leavesley, Jimmie Chew, Roland Viger, Christine Turner, William Romme, Mark Miller, George San Miguel, Neil Cobb, Lisa Floyd-Hanna	A Modular Modeling Approach to Integrating Adaptive Modeling Systems with Resource Management in the FRAME Project
Helena Vladich, Alexey Voinov	Use of High resolution Lidar Data for Targeting and Prioritization Methodology of Residential Stormwater BMPs
Nikolai Bobylev (not attending)	Integrated Environmental Assessment of Urban Underground Infrastructure Development Policies