September 3, 2014, by Blue-Green team

Summer research in Boulder and Portland

1. Uncertainty in climate change research

Lan Hoang from the Blue-Green Cities team recently attended a workshop on “Uncertainty in climate change research: an integrated approach”, organised by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, USA (NCAR). The workshop gathered various notable speakers from across the field of climate change research, as well as participants from various countries. The central focus was on the linkages of uncertainty across disciplines and research groups, in particular, integrating research from climate/Earth systems projects and climate modelling, to impact studies.

Key points were highlighted by various speakers at the event;

• David Budescu, Fordham University USA, spoke about the interesting issues of judgment, communication and decisions under uncertainty;
• Casey Brown, University of Massachusetts USA, and Rob Lempert, RAND Corporation USA, discussed different decision making frameworks;
• Rob Wilby, University of Loughborough UK, spoke about bottom-up system stress-testing;
• Suraje Dessai, University of Leeds UK, discussed what constitutes good national climate scenarios, and;
• Leonard Smith, London School of Economics and University of Oxford UK, presented on distinguishing uncertainty, diversity and insight.

The participants also took part in interactive activities such as panel discussions, interdisciplinary group work and decision making games. Together with her group, Lan and other participants attended a R-game session which examined sustainable harvest of fisheries under climate change uncertainty. Within the interdisciplinary group work, Lan and her colleagues did a small project on the compound risk of wild fires, droughts and heat wave in Clark County, Nevada USA. The group presented a decision making tool which combines Analytica and Netlogo to let the users test different adaptation strategies under different future scenarios. Overall, the workshop was an excellent platform for linking researchers from different disciplines towards integrated approaches of climate change research.

2. Continuation of research in Portland, Oregon, as part of the Clean Water for All project (CWFA)

On the second part of her US trip, Lan went back to Portland to continue her CWFA research. During this second visit, with great support from other CWFA US partners, and especially Maggie Skenderian (Portland Bureau of Environment Services) and her colleagues, Lan met with various city staff and local experts and interviewed them on their experience and insights from the East Lents Floodplain restoration project. She has also had opportunity to further explore the city diversity, from the bustling downtown area to the diverse East Lents area. Her interviews brought out various aspects and perceptions of the role of green infrastructure within the city, as well as how to effectively collaborate and manage the impact it creates. The results will be written up for publication in an academic journal.

Lan’s work over the summer focussed on identifying and evaluating the multiple benefits of the Blue-Green infrastructure in Portland (CWFA Topic 5) and allowed her gain more knowledge within this subject areas, by putting the City stakeholders at the heart of her research.

 

Read more about the evaluation of multiple benefits of Blue-Green Cities on our website. 

Blog post by Lan Hoang, Cambridge University.

 

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