Climate Change Decision-Making

This course presents decision science to students, showing it to be a source of concepts and techniques to promote more extensive and effective climate action. It emphasizes the relevance of decision science to students who are planning professional careers in climate-focused organizations and sectors, while also being of value to students who plan future studies in academic and professional programs. As is widely recognized, there has been insufficient progress towards the goals of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at safe levels and of adapting to existing and projected climate impacts. Understanding how individuals and organizations make decisions is a key step to reducing this gap. Decision science can help design resources (finance, regulation, governance, information and communications) in ways that promote action. The field of decision science emerged decades ago, drawing on psychology, economics and other social science fields to address problems of poor decision-making in areas such as finance and health. Recent research has extended this field to climate action. It has clarified the obstacles that impede climate decision-making in many settings, and it has developed techniques to improve these decisions. There is an increasing body of empirical research that tests the effectiveness of these techniques in a wide variety of settings. This course familiarizes students with central concepts and methods of decision science. The modules of the course focus on specific concepts and on techniques linked to them, drawing on concrete examples from climate-relevant domains such as disaster risk reduction, health, energy, water and food security. The readings include studies which assess the effectiveness of specific techniques to support climate decisions. The course covers a range of different approaches. It shows that each of these can be useful to address obstacles to effective decision-making, but there is no silver bullet. Instead, the course provides students with means to select the decision techniques that are effective to address specific issues in specific contexts.