Focus of this Chapter
This chapter introduces decision-making frameworks that are useful for considering choices about climate change responses through the complementary strategies of adaptation and mitigation. It also includes numerous examples in which decision support tools are being employed in making adaptation and mitigation decisions. It focuses on the processes that promote sustained interaction between decision-makers and the scientific/technical community. This chapter reviews the state of knowledge and practice in the context of managing risk. Extensive literature makes clear that in many cases, decisions aided by the types of approaches described here prove more successful than unaided decisions.2,189 Because of space limitations, the chapter describes some general classes of tools but does not assess specific decision support tools.