Vanessa Schweizer

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I am a postgraduate scientist in the Integrated Science Program at NCAR (the National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder, CO. My PhD is in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, where I was affiliated with the Climate Decision Making Center. My research interests include characterizing the human dimensions of global change namely greenhouse gas emissions due to socioeconomic development (i.e., energy demand and land use) and development policies that affect socioeconomic vulnerability to changes in climate (i.e., capacities for preventing or responding to crop failures and damages from extreme weather events). I use a technique for constructing and studying self-consistent socioeconomic scenarios called cross-impact balance (CIB) analysis. In the literature, CIB has been described as analogous to multi-value Kauffman nets and cellular automata.

I am self-taught in the CIB technique and look forward to learning more about graph theory and other versions of network analysis. I am interested in applying tools from complexity science to problems of decision making under uncertainty and to planning for socio-ecological resilience. My ideas for some connections are that decision making under uncertainty might be better aided through nested, conditional scenarios (as opposed to the presentation of small sets of alternative horizontal scenarios, which is currently the dominant practice). Through investigating the many pathways of nested scenarios, critical transitions in socio-ecological systems (and decision points for desirable or undesirable futures) may become more obvious.