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TEAM MODEL FOR EVALUATING ALTERNATIVE ADAPTATION STRATEGIES
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Advances in the scientific literature have focused attention on the need to develop adaptation strategies to reduce the risks, and take advantage of the opportunities, posed by climate change and climate variability. Adaptation needs to be considered as part of any response plan. But appropriate adaptive responses will vary across different geographic regions since the potential consequences of climate change and variability for human and natural systems will vary regionally in scope and severity. The assessment of consequences and selection of appropriate adaptation strategies is a complex challenge for regional and local decision makers. To aid in these assessments, the U.S. EPA developed a decision support software system called the Tool for Environmental Assessment and Management (TEAM) that employs a multi-criteria approach for evaluating actions to address climate change impacts. Applications of TEAM have revealed some strengths of this tool: (1) transparency of the methodology used in TEAM is important, particularly to international audiences; (2) the structure encourages users to consider strategies and attributes from an array of disciplines, which leads to more effective outcomes; (3) the ability to consider and understand tradeoffs of noncomparable attributes is essential to good decision making; and (4) TEAM fosters communication and consensus among participants in the decision making process, in particular through the use of visual display features and sensitivity analyses. Suggested Citation: The TEAM Model for Evaluating Alternative Adaptation Strategies,with Susan Herrod-Julius, in Proceedings of the XIV-th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, Springer-Verlag, forthcoming, 1999.