Games and Models for Human–Environment Problem Solving

5 November 2026 (Thursday), 11:00-12:00 JST
MIRAI CREA 2F Large Conference Room
(in-person only)

About the Lecture

In many of the ways that people lean on and benefit from the environment, they create problems. Across challenges like water allocation, forest protection, and fishery management, people face uncertainties, nonlinearities, and failures to communicate or work collectively. These challenges commonly span scales, from local to global, and actors, from resource users to resource managers. Finding ways to improve the understanding of human–environment problems, and to harmonize that understanding across different actors, offers a path toward better solutions. The lecture discusses the challenges of establishing construct validity in modeling human decision-making, the potential for linking actors across scales through multi-level games and agent-based models, and how these approaches can contribute to a shared understanding of human–environment systems. Together, they offer a pathway toward more transparent modeling, clearer assumptions, and a better understanding of what modeling tools can reveal.

About the Speaker

Dr. Andrew Reid Bell (PhD Michigan, 2010) is the Schleifer Family Professor of Sustainability at Cornell University’s Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment and director of the Environment and Livelihoods Modeling Lab (elm-lab.org). His work focuses on decision-making in rural livelihoods, drawing on behavioral experiments and modeling tools to understand how people make decisions and how the consequences of those decisions unfold at scale.