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"Prepared for the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Secretariat."

This report highlights RAND’s contributions to the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s Master Plan. Its purpose is to help policymakers in other coastal regions understand the value of a solid technical foundation to support decisionmaking on strategies to reduce flood risk, rebuild or restore coastal environments, and increase the resilience of developed coastal regions.

As the United States creates the Space Force as a service within the Department of the Air Force, RAND assessed which units to bring into the Space Force, analyzed career field sustainability, and drew lessons from other defense organizations. The report focuses on implications for effectiveness, efficiency, independence, and sense of identity for the new service.

The goal of traditional resource assessments is to estimate the nation's potential supply of natural gas and oil resources. As part of our research, we examined four recent assessments: the U.S. Geological Survey National Oil and Gas Resource Assessment Team, 1995; Minerals Management Service, 2000; National Petroleum Council, 1999; and Potential Gas Committee, 20012 Although the assessments vary, they agree that the Intermountain West contains substantial natural gas and oil resources. These assessments estimate what is called the "technically recoverable" resource3-the amount of the resource that is estimated to be recoverable given certain assumptions about exploration and production capabilities. Resources are evaluated in terms of geological criteria and technical feasibility of recovery, but without economic or other considerations. These estimates, therefore, are not intended to indicate how much resource will likely be developed and at what cost.

This report is the last of a six-volume series in which RAND explores the elements of a national strategy for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. It analyzes U.S. strengths and weaknesses, and suggests adaptations for this new era of turbulence and uncertainty. The report offers three alternative strategic concepts and evaluates their underlying assumptions, costs, risks, and constraints.

This report presents a framework that mission owners and civil engineers at Air Force installations can use to assess their level of energy assurance.

This report presents a decisionmaking framework and supporting indicators for urban responses to climate change based on risk governance, emphasizing capacities to transform policies, institutions, financing, and other actions to affect change.

The loss of life and devastation in the Gulf coast region of the United States following the hurricane season of 2005 has led to considerable debate about what should be done and not done in recovering from the damage and mitigating the consequences of future floods. This document reports the experiences of four major floods since 1948 (two in the United States, one in the Netherlands, and one in China), to draw lessons for the Gulf coast restoration effort. The authors conclude that (1) attending to history leads to mitigating the potential damage of floods even when major floods are few and.

The Jinan Municipal Water Resources Bureau, with support from the Shandong Provincial Department of Water Resources, asked RAND to evaluate potential effects of demand and climate uncertainties on investments recently undertaken according to the Jinan City Water Ecological Development Implementation Plan. RAND was also asked to assess the potential of new investments and management strategies to help Jinan meet its long-term water resources goals. RAND's approach uses well-tested methods of decision support, starting with building a shared understanding of the nature of the decision, metrics to evaluate progress toward goals, key uncertainties that drive outcomes, and relevant physical and other relationships within Jinan's complex water system. The approach also uses visualizations to help policymakers understand the implications of the results, build consensus, and facilitate decision making. This document describes RAND's approach and results, including the development of a mathematical simulation model of the Jinan water system, using the Water Evaluation and Planning software developed by the Stockholm Environmental Institute, and analysis of the system's performance under a range of uncertainties about future climate and demand across sectors--