The CRED Team Welcomes You

Before our Center was created in 2004, the "gang of four"—our Executive Committee, Balstad, Broad, Krantz and Weber — were all acquainted with each other's work, and had already been learning from one another and from each other's colleagues at Columbia and elsewhere. The development of our NSF proposal, for a Center for the study of decision making under climate-related uncertainty, intensified and extended these existing collegial relationships. When funding was approved in 2004, we added the Associate Director, Marx, and Assistant Director, Shome, to administer and help guide the Center. We try to manage by consensus.

The goal of our center is to advance the scientific understanding of how people—cognitively, emotionally, and strategically—deal with climate uncertainty both individually and in interactions with others. We also work on how a better scientific understanding can be translated into decision tools and policy recommendations. This agenda requires us to work across disciplinary boundaries and the CRED team consists of anthropologists, agronomists, climatologists, economists, historians, and psychologists. It also requires us to be eclectic and integrative in our methodologies, which include mathematical modeling, laboratory experiments, ethnographic methods and some field experiments, with emphasis on cross-fertilization between laboratory and field work.

We are finding considerable excitement in the interplay of lab and field. For example, analysis of observations of real-world group decision processes may be most fruitful if one starts with good ideas of what to observe and code in the field. To develop our ideas on observing and coding group decision processes, we make direct observation on laboratory groups, relating these observations to subsequent decisions. This can lead both to better understanding of group processes and more efficient observation and coding of such processes.

To take another example, economists associated with our Center have been working on contractual mechanisms that can reduce climate-related risk. Novel contractual mechanisms may, however, be hard to understand and therefore hard for people to accept. We are developing laboratory studies to ascertain whether prior experience with uncertainty, and with uncertainty reduction through information, makes such contractual mechanisms easier to understand and more acceptable

We invite you to explore our website now and in years to come as our projects mature to find out more about CRED activities and about our results and tools.