Dr. Casey Brown asks "where are we most vulnerable?"

On November 30^th, Dr. Casey Brown, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UMass, addressed the Climate Impacts in New England Seminar (For best video quality, use this link::

 "Robust methods for assessing and managing climate change risks to the Great Lakes"). Brown presented a new approach to Climate Change risk assessments and mitigation and adaptation planning, that he argues is both more cost effective and more relevant.

Brown has been working on a 50 year water resource management plan for the Great Lakes, and used to project to demonstrate his approach.  Simply put, Brown advocates focusing on a risk assessment, before attempting to identify what future conditions will be.  Most planning will focus on a particular resource or infrastructure.  There may be conditions that have little impact on the decisions to be made, and other conditions that pose a great risk even if they are less likely to occur.  Brown's  article clarifies his "decision scaling" approach.

Brown gave some specific examples. Brown showed graphs of flow regimes and target water releases from Lake Superior to Lake Huron.  Surprisingly, a couple of the management plans preformed equally well in high and low rainfall, while others functioned well at only one end of the predicted range of rainfall.  The choice of plans in this situation did not require the (unfortunately expensive and somewhat speculative) narrowing of rainfall probabilities.  In some situations, additional probability estimates will be critical to orient planning choices.

Brown argues that climate science is so course, particularly in terms of computer modeling, that getting an accurate sense of how a regional climate will play out on the local scale is expansive, time consuming, and rife with variables.  Better to identify which issues might cause the most problems, design flexible solutions that can address multiple scenarios, and then apply intensive research to those questions that pose the greatest vulnerability. 

Advanced research becomes more focused, and the emphasis of urban planning, or regional planning shifts from preparing for the likeliest of many possible scenarios to preparing for the widest range of likely conditions, and those most concerning. Contingency planning becomes more conscious. Since more frequent extreme weather is a consistent prediction; from drought, to heavy rainfall, and storms; vulnerability seems the most important facet to concentrate on.

Brown is a researcher on the Civil and Environmental Engineering team creating flow projections, and an optimization model for the Ct. River project.  It would be fascinating to see if a risk assessment preceded the down- scaling of climate change predictions to the Ct River Valley, and if so, how the risk assessment shifted the project’s focus.