Operationalizing Climate Proofing in Decision/Policy Making

The purpose of this work is to present an operational approach to include consideration of global change drivers (climatic, economic, social, etc.) in support to the design of local policies or investment plans. In both cases decision/policy makers typically have sets of plausible solutions and decisions to be taken in terms of choices among sets of plausible solutions with the best knowledge about the future dynamics of endogenous and exogenous system variables. The ambition is to identify the preferable solution(s) (in terms of technical performances, acceptance by stakeholders, cost–benefit ratio, etc.) in a medium term perspective, (e.g., 10–40 years), with current knowledge about the problem and under the effect of important sources of uncertainty (both aleatory and epistemic). Common to most decision contexts in a medium term perspective typical of both investment decisions and adaptation policies is the prevalence of economic signals in the shorter term and of climatic signals in the longer term. Models play a fundamental role in both cases, but they rarely cover the whole set of variables needed for decision making and the outcomes usually require integration of qualitative expert knowledge or simply subjective judgements. Multi-criteria analysis coupled with uncertainty analysis can contribute with methodologically sound and operational solutions. This paper elaborates on a series of recent cases with the ambition to extract common elements for a general methodological framework.