PROJECT SUMMARY
Five years ago, in response to the original Decision Making Under Uncertainty solicitation,
a group of researchers at Arizona State University proposed Greater Phoenix as a compelling
laboratory for the study of water-management decisions in the face of climate uncertainty and
rapid growth. In 2004, NSF established the Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC) as a
boundary organization at the interface of science and policy and as a center for climateadaptation research and experimentation. It is now clear that the fundamental challenges facing
Phoenix—physical exposure, lack of adaptive capacity, institutions ill suited to 21st-century
uncertainties, and weak linkages between the science and policy communities—are in no way
unique to this desert region, but transferable to rapidly growing cities across the West and,
indeed, across the world.
DCDC II, infused with new and enhanced collaborations with investigators at ASU and
community partners, will: 1) broaden and deepen our interaction with the decision-making
community to include private-sector actors and public interests and move closer to the ideal of a
boundary organization that translates science into decisions and actions; 2) extend research
domains to address not only water, but interconnected energy and land-use decisions in a
complex dynamic urban system; 3) refine DCDC’s water-simulation model (WaterSim) to
capture the scale dynamics, economic feedbacks, and distributional effects of climate-change
decisions; and 4) work with the Central Arizona–Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research
project to measure, monitor, and model tradeoffs among ecosystem services, social equity, and
economic well-being. DCDC II will present concrete approaches for institutionalizing the
boundary-organization concept: it will expand the collaborative beyond water managers;
engage students in the interactive, iterative, and personal process of public collaboration; and
train faculty members to convey best practices in boundary work.
The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in the production of new knowledge about
individual and societal responses to climate change and other environmental risks and about
best practices for boundary organizations, those at the interface of science and policy. DCDC
II explicitly seeks to identify problems in Pasteur’s Quadrant where new knowledge
production is coincident with solving practical problems. Given the broad mandate of
conducting socially relevant research about decision making under uncertainty, it is
anticipated that new knowledge production will occur at the boundaries—between and
among traditional social science and environmental-science fields, between individual and
institutional decision making, and across research, education, and outreach.
By focusing on these boundary zones, DCDC II will have broader impacts on both science
and society. New knowledge about urban-system dynamics can be applied to improving
planning strategies for making cities less climate-sensitive. New knowledge about decision
making in the face of long-term environmental risk will aid in formulating approaches to
adaptation strategies based on the best-available, social-science understanding of individual
motivations and societal norms. WaterSim is a mechanism for scenario planning and, in
collaboration with ASU’s Decision Theater, offers a unique opportunity for collaboration with
community stakeholders. DCDC students will continue their leadership of cross-DMUU site
collaboration, and the educational program is already beginning to produce the next generation
of transdisciplinary scholars who can move easily between the worlds of science and policy.

Project Summary - 1