Uncertainty management in the IPCC: agreeing to disagree

Looking back over three and a half Assessment Reports, we see that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has given increasing attention to the management and reporting of uncertainties, but coordination across working groups (WGs) has remained an issue. We argue that there are good reasons for working groups to use different methods to assess uncertainty, thus it is better that working groups agree to disagree rather than seek to bring everybody on one party line.IPCC; uncertainty

Uncertainty Management in Smart Environment

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Uncertainty management by relaxation of conflicting constraints in production process scheduling

Mathematical-analytical methods as used in Operations Research approaches are often insufficient for scheduling problems. This is due to three reasons: the combinatorial complexity of the search space, conflicting objectives for production optimization, and the uncertainty in the production process. Knowledge-based techniques, especially approximate reasoning and constraint relaxation, are promising ways to overcome these problems. A case study from an industrial CIM environment, namely high-grade steel production, is presented to demonstrate how knowledge-based scheduling with the desired capabilities could work. By using fuzzy set theory, the applied knowledge representation technique covers the uncertainty inherent in the problem domain. Based on this knowledge representation, a classification of jobs according to their importance is defined which is then used for the straightforward generation of a schedule. A control strategy which comprises organizational, spatial, temporal, and chemical constraints is introduced. The strategy supports the dynamic relaxation of conflicting constraints in order to improve tentative schedules

Antecedents of risk and uncertainty management capabilities:Insights from multinational enterprises in New Zealand

Risks and uncertainties of increasing severity and variety characterise the operating environments of most multinational enterprises (MNEs). Surprisingly limited attention has been given to understanding the antecedents and nature of risk and uncertainty management capabilities. In this study, we contribute to the organisational capability research, by examining the antecedents of risk and uncertainty management capabilities and theorising how MNEs develop and transfer risk and uncertainty management capabilities across borders. By drawing on empirical evidence from MNEs operating in New Zealand, we conceptualise the role of environmental factors – including country risk profile and regulatory environment – in shaping firms' risk and uncertainty management capabilities. We also inductively theorise about the organisational factors that support the development of risk and uncertainty management capabilities in MNEs, and explain which factors influence their cross-border transferability. Finally, we discuss our study's limitations and offer future research directions

Arms Control as Uncertainty Management

For decades or longer, policy-makers have sought to use arms control to reduce the uncertainty endemic to the international security environment. Because uncertainty is pervasive in these situations, however, practitioners themselves are naturally vulnerable to its effects. This paper seeks to help policy-makers optimize arms control outcomes by providing improved theory and best practices for goal-setting and strategy selection using the judicious application of decision theoretic concepts. The paper first lays out a suitable role for decision theory in the study and analysis of arms control, arguing that “uncertainty” is a more appropriate concept for description and analysis here than is “risk.” Prior approaches that rely on “risk” have tended to drive the search for arms control best practices, but “risk” requires the use of probability estimates that are frequently not available or not a good indicator of potential outcomes. Second, the paper argues that decision-makers are vulnerable to the effects of missing information and the uncertainty it causes in the run-up to and during arms control negotiations. Consequently, they are subject to biases and resort to the use of security-specific heuristics, including worst-case scenario thinking, limited-theater-of-war thinking, and low-dimension (or non-complex) thinking when setting goals and employing strategies for negotiating arms control agreements. The paper discusses the origins of this uncertainty and the strategies that states could employ as a result of these security-specific heuristics, arguing that they can best be grouped into two types—risk reduction versus uncertainty management. Finally, the paper makes recommendations for optimizing outcomes—for getting efficient negotiations that result in robust, durable agreements, capable of managing uncertainty about security, despite the effects of missing information