Decision support experiments and evaluations using seasonal to ...

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program Chapter 3
Individual decision
makers typically
omit or ignore key
elements of good
decision processes
when they have poor,
no, or little data.
88
(NRC, 2008). Moreover, governance processes
that cross various agencies, jurisdictions, and
stakeholder interests are rarely straightforward,
linear, or predictable because different actors
are asked to provide information or resources
peripheral to their central functions. In the
absence of clear lines of authority, trust among
actors and open lines of communication are
essential (NRC, 2008).
As shown in Chapter 4 in the discussion of the
South Florida water management case, a regulatory
change introduced to guide water release
decisions helped increase certainty and trust in
the water allocation and management process.
The South Florida Water Management District
uses a Water Supply and Environment (WSE)
schedule for Lake Okeechobee that employs
seasonal and multi-seasonal climate outlooks
as guidance for regulatory releases (Obeysekera
et al., 2007). The WSE schedule, in turn, uses
ENSO and Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation
(AMO; Enfield et al., 2001) to estimate net
inflow. The discussion of this case shows how
regulatory changes initially intended to simply
guide water release decisions can also help
build greater certainty and trust in the water
allocation and management process by making
decisions predictable and transparent.
3.2.5.3 data problemS
Lack of information about geographical and
temporal variability in climate processes is one
of the primary barriers to adoption and use of
specific products. An important dimension of
this lack of information problem, relevant to discussions
of reliability and trust, revolves around
how decision makers make decisions when they
have poor, no, or little data. Decision research
from the social and behavioral sciences suggests
that when faced with such problems, individual
decision makers typically omit or ignore key
elements of good decision processes. This leads
to decisions that are often ineffective in bringing
about the results they intended (Slovic et al.,
1977). Furthermore, decision makers, such as
water managers responsible for making flow or
allocation decisions based on incomplete forecast
data, may respond to complex tasks by employing
professional judgment to simplify them
in ways that seem adequate to the problem at
hand, sometimes adopting “heuristic rules” that
presume different levels of risk are acceptable
based on their prior familiarity with a similar
set of problems (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974;
Payne et al., 1993).
Decision makers and the public also may respond
to probabilistic information or questions
involving uncertainty with predictable biases
that ignore or distort important information
(Kahneman et al., 1982) or exclude alternative
scenarios and possible decisions (e.g., Keeney,
1992; NRC, 2005). ENSO forecasts illustrate
some of these problems 11 . Operational ENSObased
forecasts have only been made since the
late 1980s while ENSO-related products that
provide information about which forecasts are
likely to be most reliable for what time periods
and in which areas, have an even shorter history.
Thus, decision-maker experience in their
use has been limited. Essential knowledge for
informed use of ENSO forecasts includes understanding
of the temporal and geographical
domain of ENSO impacts. Yet, making a decision
based only on this information may expose
a manager unnecessarily to consequences from
that decision such as having to having to make
costly decisions regarding supplying water to
residents when expected rains from an ENSO
event do not materialize.
3.2.5.4 changing environmental,
Social and economic conditionS
Over the past three decades, a combination of
economic changes (e.g., reductions in federal
spending for large water projects), environ-
11 El Niños tend to bring higher-than-average winter
precipitation to the U.S. Southwest and Southeast
while producing below-average precipitation in the
Pacific Northwest. By contrast, La Niñas produce
drier-than-average winter conditions in the Southeast
and Southwest while increasing precipitation received
in the Pacific Northwest.