Sustainability Under Severe Uncertainty: A Methodological Study

Sustainable development needs not only the evaluation of the status quo, but also prediction and strategic decision-making for the future. During a methodological study on sustainability, one of the most challenging tasks is how to deal with uncertainty, since the available information and data (technical or non-technical) are almost always uncertain, incomplete, and imprecise, and the possessed knowledge is usually insufficient and imperfect. Clearly, these difficulties hinder the advancement of sustainability engineering and science. In this presentation, the applicability of three types of approaches to handling severe uncertainty: the information gap approach, the probability bounds analysis approach, and the fuzzy logic approach will be analyzed and assessed. A general guideline for handling uncertainties in modeling, analysis, and decision making will be presented. This will be particularly valuable for sustainability-purposed modeling, analysis, design, and decision-making.