This article describes a social simulation model based on an economic experiment about altruistic behavior. The experiment by Fehr and Gächter showed that participants made frequent use of costly punishment in order to ensure continuing cooperation in a common pool resource game. The model...

Dealing with uncertainties in water management is an important issue and is one which will only increase in light of global changes, particularly climate change. So far, uncertainties in water management have mostly been assessed from a scientific point of view, and in quantitative terms. In...

For decades, the Chinese government has been searching for solutions to cope with the increasing imbalance between the supply and demand of water in the Yellow River Basin. This paper aims at a better understanding of the development of the water allocation regime in the Yellow River Basin...

Over the past decade a series of major revisions to the generation and use of knowledge in the context of natural resources management has started to undermine basic assumptions on which traditional approaches to water management were based. Limits to our ability to predict and control water...

A cross-comparison of climate change adaptation strategies across regions was performed, considering six large river basins as case study areas. Three of the basins, namely the Elbe, Guadiana, and Rhine, are located in Europe, the Nile Equatorial Lakes region and the Orange basin are in Africa,...

Water management is facing major challenges due to increasing uncertainties caused by climate and global change and by fast changing socio-economic boundary conditions. More attention has to be devoted to understanding and managing the transition from current management regimes to more adaptive...

Uncertainty is highly relevant in environmental policy because on the one hand environmental problems are regarded as complex and require a long-term perspective and on the other hand the knowledge available to practitioners and policy makers alike is often fragmentary and not systemised. One...

Understanding the dynamics of attitude formation is a key issue in social psychology. The paper presents a computational model for simulating the formation and change of attitudes and the influence of the strength of attitudes on behavior. The main conceptual challenge was to capture not only...