Welcome to CEVE 421/521!

Lecture

Mon., Jan. 8

Meet the professor

Dr. James Doss-Gollin

Your turn

  1. Name / what you prefer to be called
  2. Year
  3. Major / research topic / field of study
  4. One thing you want to learn from this class

What is climate risk management?

Today

  1. What is climate risk management?

  2. Example decisions

  3. About the course

  4. Software tools

  5. Logistics

Climate

The slowly varying aspects of the atmosphere–hydrosphere–land surface system.

AMS Glossary of Meteorology

: USGS Water Cycle

Climate Risk

: IPCC SROCC

Climate Risk

Your turn!

What climate risks have you heard of?

Climate Risk Management

Your turn!

What climate risk management strategies have you heard of?

  • Financial instruments (e.g., insurance)
  • Floodproof buildings
  • Zoning codes
  • Major infrastructure
  • Improve emergency planning

Example decisions

Today

  1. What is climate risk management?

  2. Example decisions

  3. About the course

  4. Software tools

  5. Logistics

Update land use / zoning regulations?

: Satija et al. (2016)

How to size stormwater infrastructure?

: Doss-Gollin

How high to elevate a house for proactive flood protection?

: Allison Lee / Houston Public Media

Require weatherization of privately owned electricity infrastructure?

: Jonathan Cutrer / Flickr.

About the course

Today

  1. What is climate risk management?

  2. Example decisions

  3. About the course

  4. Software tools

  5. Logistics

Course goals

Climate risk management is a very broad field. We will:

  1. Survey how it is implemented in different fields
  2. Develop a deep understanding of how to assess proposed climate risk strategies
  3. Apply these methods to a real-world problem

The syllabus is online!

Course organization

Module 1: introduction

  1. Introduction
  2. Science of climate hazard
  3. Vulnerability, exposure, and impacts
  4. Systems

Course organization

Module 2: decision analysis

  1. Cost-benefit analysis
  2. Scenario analysis
  3. Policy search and optimization
  4. Multiobjective policy search
  5. Sequential decision problems

Course organization

Module 3: thinking critically

  1. Robustness
  2. Deep uncertainty
  3. Equity and justice
  4. Financial and systemic risks
  5. Reflections

Class structure

Mondays

  • Lecture
  • Take notes and ask questions
  • Slides posted by Sunday night (or earlier, though minor changes Monday morning possible)
  • To print, follow the official Quarto instructions)

Class structure

Wednesdays

  • Short and easy reading quiz to start
  • Student-led reading discussion
  • Do the reading and participate in the discussion (including to ask questions!)

Class structure

Fridays

  • Lab.
  • Make significant progress in class.
  • Due at the start of next lab.

Acommodations

If you have a documented disability, scheduling conflicts, or otherwise need accommodations, please let me know as soon as possible

Viruses are circulating and everyone’s immune system is different. If you need others to wear a mask to protect you, please let me know – no health disclosures needed.

Academic integrity

  • AI/ML resource policy in the syllabus
  • Rice Honor Code
  • See some examples from Vivek Srikrishnan (Cornell) and Tony Wong (RIT)
  • If in doubt, ask!

A community of learning

  • We all benefit from a diverse, safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment
  • Analysis is not value neutral – we will discuss how to think critically about the assumptions and values underlying our work, and their implications
  • Assume good faith of others and engage in good faith yourself

Pre-requisites

We will use quantitative language and ideas to frame ideas. The only formal pre-requisite is a first course in probability / statistics

Exposure to some of the following will be helpful:

  • Engineering economics
  • Programming
  • Climate science
  • Engineering design

Important

If you’re not sure whether you should take the class, come talk to me!

Grading

Weekly reading quizzes (10%)

  • Designed to be easy if you do the reading
  • 5 minutes at the start of discussion days
  • Will drop the lowest two

Grading

Labs (10%)

  • Graded for completion only:
    • 3: complete
    • 2: missing important parts
    • 1: barely tried
    • 0: nothing
  • Solutions will be posted. You are responsible for going through solutions.

Grading

Tests

  • In-class exams
  • I’ll try to make them straightforward!

Grading

Project (30%)

  • Labs will build on each other to create a final project
  • Your task is to add something new to the project
  • Present during final exam block

Grading

Reading discussion (10%, 521 only)

521 students will lead one reading discussion. Contact me to schedule!

Reading notes (10%)

  • Everyone will take notes once during the semester on a reading discussion.
  • I will share sign-up info.
  • Groups allowed as needed.

Software tools

Today

  1. What is climate risk management?

  2. Example decisions

  3. About the course

  4. Software tools

  5. Logistics

Tool overview

In this class, we will use

  1. Julia
  2. GitHub
  3. Quarto
  4. VS Code (suggested)

Why Julia?

  • Syntax
    • Readable to computers and humans
    • Closely parallels math notation
  • Designed for numerical and scientific computing
  • Fast!
    • “Two language problem”
    • All you need is Julia
  • Open source

Julia example

A (naive) implementation of the Fibonacci sequence:

function fib(n)
    if n < 2
        return n
    else
        return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)
    end
end
fib(10)
55

GitHub

  1. You need a GitHub account
  2. Code is stored in “repositories”
  3. clone a repository to your computer
  4. Make changes and commit them
  5. push your changes to GitHub
  6. Using GitHub classroom, instructors can view your code

Quarto

Quarto is a tool that allows you to combine text and code and create many types of output

  • This website is made with Quarto
  • You will use Quarto to create reports for labs
    • Everything in one place
    • No running code, save a figure to Downloads, copy into Word, then update your code and try to remember where to paste it
  • Reproducible

VS Code

  1. VS Code is a text editor
    1. If you are an advanced user of another text editor, you can use that instead, but I recommend VS Code
  2. VS Code can work as a Julia IDE

Resources

See the resources page for links to tutorials and other resources!

Logistics

Today

  1. What is climate risk management?

  2. Example decisions

  3. About the course

  4. Software tools

  5. Logistics

Reading

For Wednesday:

  • Three news articles on flood risk management
  • Come prepared for a discussion on Wednesday
  • Reading quiz should be very easy if you do the reading

Lab 1

  • Generally no advance preparation needed
  • For our first lab, we will be installing required software for the course.
  • Please start working on this lab as soon as possible so that we can use Friday’s lab session to troubleshoot any issues and review the material.

References

Satija, N., Collier, K., & Shaw, A. (2016, December 7). Boomtown, flood town. ProPublica: Hell and High Water. Retrieved from https://projects.propublica.org/houston-cypress/