Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making

The 21st century promises to be an era dominated by international response to c- tain global environmental challenges such as climate change, depleting biodiversity and biocapacity as well as general atmospheric, water and soil pollution problems. Consequently, Environmental decision making (EDM) is a socially important ?eld of development for Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS). - certainty is an important feature of these decision problems and it intervenes at very different time and space scales. The Handbook on “Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making” provides a guided tour of selected methods and tools that OR/MS offer to deal with these issues. Below, we brie?y introduce, peer reviewed, chapters of this handbook and the topics that are treated by the invited authors. The ?rst chapter is a general introduction to the challenges of environmental decision making, the use of OR/MS techniques and a range of tools that are used to deal with uncertainty in this domain.

The 21st century promises to be an era dominated by international response to c- tain global environmental challenges such as climate change, depleting biodiversity and biocapacity as well as general atmospheric, water and soil pollution problems. Consequently, Environmental decision making (EDM) is a socially important ?eld of development for Operations Research and Management Science (OR/MS). - certainty is an important feature of these decision problems and it intervenes at very different time and space scales. The Handbook on “Uncertainty and Environmental Decision Making” provides a guided tour of selected methods and tools that OR/MS offer to deal with these issues. Below, we brie?y introduce, peer reviewed, chapters of this handbook and the topics that are treated by the invited authors. The ?rst chapter is a general introduction to the challenges of environmental decision making, the use of OR/MS techniques and a range of tools that are used to deal with uncertainty in this domain.

OR/MS and Environmental Decision Making under Uncertainty.- Modeling Uncertainty in a Large scale integrated Energy-Climate Model.- Robust Optimization for Environmental and Energy Planning.- Coping with Climate Risks in Indonesian Rice Agriculture: A Policy Perspective.- A Primer on Weather Derivatives.- Optimal Control Models and Elicitation of Attitudes towards Climate Damages.- A Stochastic Control/Game Approach to the Optimal Timing of Climate Policies.- Precautionary Effect and Variations of the Value of Information.- Comparative Forecasting and a Test for Persistence in the El Ni#x00F1;o Southern Oscillation.- Generation of Synthetic Sequences of Electricity Demand with Applications.- Models for Improving Management of Biosolids Odors.