Collaborative Research: A Proposal for the Cosmic-Ray prOduced NUclide Systematics on Earth (CRONUS-Earth) Project

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The central thesis to this project is that household decision making under uncertainty functions within a complex system of human-environment interactions with many socio-economic, policy, and institutional forces also playing roles. Two workshops will be conducted that will bring together a number of social scientists, ecologists, modelers, and others working with climate forecasts and remote sensing to better understand what is known across several sites globally about decision making under uncertainty. These workshops will form the basis for one or more synthesis papers in peer-reviewed publications. The results of these workshops also will serve as the basis for the development of a general approach for analyzing decision making within the context of environmental and socio-economic factors. Project leaders will develop an integrative research plan to 1) synthesize what is known about household patterns and processes of decision making associated with climate variability from sites around the world including North America, Amazonia, Africa, and Central Asia; 2) collect data where needed for the synthesis; 3) develop or adapt and link socio-economic agent-based household models to ecosystem models to test hypotheses that relate climate variability and climate change to decision making and the impacts and consequences they have on people and ecosystems, and; 4) develop a series of workshops, seminars, and training sessions for students, researchers, and decision makers. Research that focuses on household and community behavior is important because it is at that level where fundamental decisions are made regarding climate variability. It is also the place where climate variability and change is felt most directly and severely and where people are most vulnerable to climate perturbations. The project will refine current knowledge about household decision making, uncertainty, and change. The integrative plans will outline the means and methods necessary to translate this knowledge into improved decision making. Future work building on this plan will advance methodological frontiers by coupling agent-based modeling, ecological models, GIS, and remote sensing to develop scenarios of decision-making under climate variability and change. Tools will be developed and means to disseminate the information to the many stakeholders at many levels, both nationally and internationally. The results will be valuable for both households and decision makers at many levels of social organization and institutions to enhance the sustainability of human communities everywhere. This developmental award was supported as part of the Fiscal Year 2003 Human and Social Dynamics priority area special competition on Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU).