Data on Risk Management Described by Researchers at Pennsylvania State University (Deep Uncertainties in Sea-Level Rise and Storm Surge Projections:…

Data on Risk Management Described by Researchers at Pennsylvania State University (Deep Uncertainties in Sea-Level Rise and Storm Surge Projections: Implications for Coastal Flood Risk Management)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Weekly News -- Researchers detail new data in Risk Management. According to news reporting originating from University Park, Pennsylvania, by VerticalNews correspondents, research stated, "Sea levels are rising in many areas around the world, posing risks to coastal communities and infrastructures. Strategies for managing these flood risks present decision challenges that require a combination of geophysical, economic, and infrastructure models."

Funders for this research include National Science Foundation, Directorate for Geosciences.

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from Pennsylvania State University, "Previous studies have broken important new ground on the considerable tensions between the costs of upgrading infrastructure and the damages that could result from extreme flood events. However, many risk-based adaptation strategies remain silent on certain potentially important uncertainties, as well as the tradeoffs between competing objectives. Here, we implement and improve on a classic decision-analytical model (Van Dantzig 1956) to: (i) capture tradeoffs across conflicting stakeholder objectives, (ii) demonstrate the consequences of structural uncertainties in the sea-level rise and storm surge models, and (iii) identify the parametric uncertainties that most strongly influence each objective using global sensitivity analysis. We find that the flood adaptation model produces potentially myopic solutions when formulated using traditional mean-centric decision theory. Moving from a single-objective problem formulation to one with multiobjective tradeoffs dramatically expands the decision space, and highlights the need for compromise solutions to address stakeholder preferences. We find deep structural uncertainties that have large effects on the model outcome, with the storm surge parameters accounting for the greatest impacts."

According to the news editors, the research concluded: "Global sensitivity analysis effectively identifies important parameter interactions that local methods overlook, and that could have critical implications for flood adaptation strategies."

For more information on this research see: Deep Uncertainties in Sea-Level Rise and Storm Surge Projections: Implications for Coastal Flood Risk Management. Risk Analysis, 2017;():. (Wiley-Blackwell - www.wiley.com/; Risk Analysis - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1539-6924)

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting P.C. Oddo, Dept. of Geosciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States. Additional authors for this research include B.S. Lee, G.G. Garner, V. Srikrishnan, P.M. Reed, C.E. Forest and K. Keller.

Keywords for this news article include: Pennsylvania, United States, University Park, Risk Management, North and Central America.

Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world. Copyright 2017, NewsRx LLC