Decision Making Under Uncertainty Collaborative Groups | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) opportunity titled "Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU) Collaborative Groups" (NSF Publication / Funding Opportunity Number 09-544) was a discretionary research funding competition designed to support a small number of large, team-based projects focused on how people and institutions make decisions when facing uncertain, long-term climate and environmental risks. The program emphasizes collaborative groups of researchers who can push forward fundamental, theory-building understanding of decision making under uncertainty, while also producing practical knowledge, methods, and tools that real decision makers can use. In other words, the research is expected to be both intellectually foundational and directly relevant to decisions influenced by climate change and other long-horizon environmental threats.

A central goal of DMUU is to improve how climate change and related environmental risks are actually incorporated into decisions made by different actors, including public officials, private-sector firms, organizations, and individuals. The competition specifically highlights the need for new knowledge about how these actors take existing climate and environmental information (which is often complex, probabilistic, contested, or incomplete) and translate it into choices about policy, investment, planning, operations, and personal behavior. The theme of "uncertainty" is not treated as a side issue; it is the core research challenge, covering questions like how uncertainty is perceived, communicated, quantified, and acted upon, and how decision processes change when consequences unfold over long time horizons.

The program is framed as interdisciplinary at its core. While it sits within NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences umbrella (CFDA 47.075), the solicitation explicitly calls for advances "within and across" the social and behavioral sciences and also welcomes integration with related science and engineering disciplines. That structure signals that NSF expected teams to combine strengths such as behavioral decision research, psychology, economics, sociology, political science, communication, organizational studies, risk analysis, modeling, and potentially climate science or engineering-relevant approaches where needed to ground the decision contexts in realistic representations of environmental change. The intended output is not only better descriptive understanding of decisions, but also actionable frameworks and tools that can support improved decision making under climate-related uncertainty.

From an administrative and funding standpoint, the awards were made as cooperative agreements, meaning NSF anticipated a more involved relationship with funded teams than a standard grant might imply, often including coordination, oversight, and structured collaboration expectations. The solicitation anticipated approximately five awards, with an estimated total program funding level of $5,000,000. Individual award sizes were large, with an award floor of $4,500,000 and an award ceiling of $7,500,000, reflecting the expectation of substantial, multi-researcher efforts rather than small single-investigator projects. Cost sharing or matching was not required.

Eligibility was limited to US academic institutions: accredited two- and four-year colleges and universities (including community colleges) with a campus located in the United States, submitting proposals on behalf of their faculty. The opportunity was posted March 10, 2009, and the full proposal deadline was July 14, 2009. The opportunity was later archived on March 8, 2010. For further details, NSF pointed applicants to the official solicitation text (NSF Publication 09-544) and provided grants.gov support contact information for access issues.

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