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Abstract
Climate change raises serious concerns for policymakers that want to ensure the success of long-term policies. To guarantee satisfactory decisions in the face of deep uncertainties, adaptive policy pathways might be used. Adaptive policy pathways are designed to take actions according to how the future will actually unfold. In adaptive pathways, a monitoring system collects the evidence required for activating the next adaptive action. This monitoring system is made of signposts and triggers. Signposts are indicators that track the performance of the pathway. When signposts reach pre-specified trigger values, the next action on the pathway is implemented. The effectiveness of the monitoring system is pivotal to the success of adaptive policy pathways, therefore the decision-makers would like to have sufficient confidence about the future capacity to adapt on time. “On time” means activating the next action on a pathway neither so early that it incurs unnecessary costs, nor so late that it incurs avoidable damages. In this paper, we show how mapping the relations between triggers and the probability of misclassification errors inform the level of confidence that a monitoring system for adaptive policy pathways can provide. Specifically, we present the “trigger-probability” mapping and the “trigger-consequences” mappings. The former mapping displays the interplay between trigger values for a given signpost and the level of confidence regarding whether change occurs and adaptation is needed. The latter mapping displays the interplay between trigger values for a given signpost and the consequences of misclassification errors for both adapting the policy or not. In a case study, we illustrate how these mappings can be used to test the effectiveness of a monitoring system, and how they can be integrated into the process of designing an adaptive policy.
Highlights
Despite all research efforts, climate change remains unpredictable in the long term, raising serious concerns for policymakers that want to ensure the success of long-term policies [1]
The trigger-probability mapping displays the interplay between trigger values for a given signpost and the level of confidence regarding both that critical conditions have changed, and that adaptation is needed
The paper is structured : in the Methodology we first describe the problem of monitoring in adaptive policies we explain how to identify and how to interpret the proposed mappings; in the Application we demonstrate the use of the instruments on a test case of an adaptive policy for costal flood protection in the Netherlands; we present our summary and discussion in the Conclusions
Summary
Climate change remains unpredictable in the long term, raising serious concerns for policymakers that want to ensure the success of long-term policies [1]. The analyst explores the consequences of multiple scenarios, often by use of a system model [18,19]: these scenarios represent the multiple possible future evolutions of the system. The analyst can assemble a long-term plan of action that can respond to a large set of possible future scenarios. This plan of action is made of multiple sequences of concatenated actions: a new action is activated if its predecessor action is no longer able to guarantee policy success. Advantages of adaptive policies are their capacity to value correctable (or scalable) decisions, modulate response to evidence of change, coordinate short- and long-term actions, and delay decisions to keep future options open [20,21,22]
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