Abstract:

This paper analyzes the essence of the deep uncertainties and its characteristic, which consists of scenario uncertainty, consequence uncertainty and alternative uncertainty, and points out the traditional “predict-then-act” risk assessment theories depends on the result of climate prediction leading to its incapable of dealing with deep uncertainties and providing robust decision. The theoretical basis of robust decision and three widely applied methods: Robust Decision Making, Info-Gap Decision Theory and Dynamic Adaptative Policy Pathway are introduced. The paper concludes that the Robust Decision Making embraces a full consideration of adaptation measures while is hard to understand with huge computation; Info-gap Decision Theory addresses on uncertainties which cannot be conveyed in probability but gives less consideration on the scenarios that the adaptation measures failed to meet the target; and Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathway provides visualized solutions of adaptation pathway but with less consideration on social-economic uncertainties. As a result, the paper proposes a new idea of integrating the Robust Decision Making with Adaptation Pathway, which is able to deliver visualized solutions pathway to support the future decision making.

Key words: Climate change adaptation, Deep uncertainty, Flood Risk, Robust decision theories