The Center for Energy and Environmental Risk (CEER) was created in 2007 in the EMS Earth and Environmental Systems Institute to further promote faculty research and graduate student opportunities in energy and environmental risk assessment and management. CEER promotes research investigating both business and policy risk across the earth science disciplines. It also promotes the themes encompassed by the undergraduate program in Energy Business and Finance but is widening the goals of that program to attract and support cross-disciplinary faculty research.
Deep uncertainty often surrounds environmental hazards and poses nontrivial decision-making challenges, as well as financial and policy risks. Yet, despite ample evidence for the risks of such long- and short-term hazards, few physical scientists learn to communicate with social scientists and policy-makers on the nature of such risks. Similarly, social scientists and policy- makers often do not have backgrounds in the relevant physical sciences. The result is often incoherent decision-making in the face of environnmental change or catastropohe, with the most severe impacts of poor decision-making often falling on the most vulnerable populations. CEER has the long range objective of promoting the study of risk and decision-making to become core foci for research the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. CEER will facilitate and stimulate discussion among many scientists and social scientists about environmental risk and finance.