Innovative Approaches to Decision-Making Under Deep Uncertainty (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Decision-making under deep uncertainty is a set of methods and tools to help people do a better job of planning when they face a future that may unfold in ways that may be unexpected or surprise them.

Speaker 2: Uncertainty is about different values of people, but also decisions that we take now influence the decision options that we have in the future.

Speaker 1: What's new about what this society is doing is trying to bring new methods and tools to help people do it better.

Speaker 2: Decision-making under uncertainty is especially useful for people or institutions that have to make decisions that have a very strong impact, also for a very long period.

Speaker 1: It can help everybody from water agencies to flood control, people planning national security to better allocate their resources under times of lots of constraints and a wide variety of conditions they're trying to address.

Speaker 2: I think the DELTA program is a nice example on how we change from a predict and act system to anticipating the future to adapt if the circumstances change.

Speaker 1: I live in the western United States in California and providing water is a big challenge and I think some of the methods and tools that this community brings can help people make better decisions.

Speaker 3: Jakarta is the capital city of Indonesia with a population of around 10.2 million people in the year 2013.

Speaker 4: Jakarta faces a lot of challenges. One of them is flooding, flooding from the rain. Jakarta is also sinking because of groundwater use, which means that also flooding from the sea is now threatening Jakarta.

Speaker 3: How to deal with the uncertainty, like for instance, social problems, environment problems, government policy, increasing population, and also how to make realistic and implementable programs. It helps much when decision makers make a government policy.

Speaker 5: Yes, New Zealand has on average eight major floods a year and in the particular area we've been working in the Hutt Valley, we have a major river.

Speaker 6: And also quite close to the coast, so we have a combination of flooding from the river and coastal inundation risks that are very severe.

Speaker 5: The flood protection was designed for a 1 in 500 year flood and that will change with climate change.

Speaker 6: And so we need to put in place a plan that will look into the long term so that the community can be confident in their safety for the long term, rather than just trying to make a short term decision.

Speaker 5: The knowledge about deep uncertainty has been around for a while, but it doesn't get taken up. And so we've turned to Deltares to help us do that.

Speaker 6: They introduced a game for us, which was quite an interesting concept, but it really helped us to actually discuss and think about the long term. So it was very, very useful for us.

Speaker 7: By the geographical location itself, Bangladesh is vulnerable to natural calamities. We have cyclones, we have floods, and every year we lose a lot of money to face these floods.

Speaker 8: So that's why we are in the process of development of the next 100 years plan, the strategic plan. Understanding the natural system better and how it reacts to interventions.

Speaker 7: At the same time, develop scenarios which come to life and which explain what the future could become. Nobody can tell what will happen. We feel that it is our moral obligation for developing a plan, we should take technical support from Netherlands and the Deltares.

Speaker 9: This group of people has gotten together now for three years, and we're forming a society that helps us build and strengthen the relationships that we've just started forging, and identifies where there may be gaps in our relationships to try to fill those in, create opportunity for our members, create interesting, engaging ways to get together and work on new and exciting things. There's tremendous uncertainty in the world and disagreement, but the methods, the tools and the skills that this community brings is about confronting those challenges to good decision making. And our hope is that if we can change the way in which decision makers see their role, see the problems that they face, they can make better decisions. And our hope is that that will lead to a better world in which we live.