Uncertainty in the economy and in sea-level rise: gaming robust strategies for coastal resilience

Year
2025
Primary Supervisor
Roger Cremades Rodeja <R.CremadesRodeja@leeds.ac.uk>
Institution
University of Leeds (School of Earth and Environment)
CASE Partner
Met Office potential
Academic Supervisors
David Dawson, Suraje Dessai <S.Dessai@leeds.ac.uk> (University of Leeds, School of Earth and Environment)
Project Partners
Met Office

Background

Sea-level rise (SLR) responses in coastal cities involve multi-decadal lead times, and human decisions face budgetary and climate uncertainties under scientific updates. In an online serious game reflecting a real-world urban decision arena, players will devise strategies against quantitative SLR storylines. What visual communication strategies would lead to the most cost-efficient risk reductions? How would the responses of humans and of a Large Language Model (LLM) be different? Decisions to be taken by players range from incentives for household measures, to protective walls, and to transformative options such as floating settlements. The information elicited from humans about these decisions will serve to inform a simulation tool, showing weaknesses in decision making that could lead coastal communities into fragile adaptation strategies.

PhD opportunity

This project will focus on the interplay of uncertainties between human dimensions and physical dimensions of climate change. The candidate will pursue data science activities extending existing high-end scenarios into impact realisations including extreme events, and using them to literally play against the decisions of online participants recruited to be representative. The way the uncertainties are represented, and how they manifest on impacts in relation to the strategies of human participants, will define how sea-level rise is communicated in the future. The biggest scientific challenges will be to find a sufficient number of representative players, and to communicate transformative options (e.g. floating settlements) as reliable adaptation measures in estuarine areas.
Dr. Cremades is a complex system scientist with a decade of experience working in cities and global change; Roger co-organised a workshop on new methods to study the economics of sea-level rise in Venice (Italy) in 2022, which stimulated some of these ideas. Dr. David Dawson is an expert in urban systems and in climate change adaptation in the UK. Prof. Suraje Dessai is an expert on uncertainty communication for decision making on adaptation to climate change. External collaborators at the MetOffice bring experience on sea level rise storylines.

Other information

Applicant profile: Strong interests in AI methods in environmental applications, particularly large language models applied to agent-based simulation models, would be beneficial.  A superficial understanding of the human and physical dimensions of global change would be relevant.

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