How do you adapt in an uncertain world?

This paper outlines one approach to tackling uncertainty that aims to ensure that adaptation decisions made today are resilient to a fast changing and uncertain climate.

The approach, based on a developing a simple route-map of adaptation options, has been demonstrated in practice in the Thames Estuary 2100 (TE2100) project for London.

The UK Environment Agency’s TE2100 project provides a real-life example of adaptation decision making under uncertainty applied to a long-lived infrastructure decision with high sunk-costs.

In this paper, the authors draw on lessons learned during TE2100 to demonstrate how such large-scale decisions can be made robust in the face of deep uncertainty over future climate, by using a route-map approach.