Part Three - Climate Risk and Response

Summary

“The future will be neither a nirvana nor a hell on earth, but an evolution of the past, a combination of our best endeavours hindered by obstacles and aided by serendipity.”

—Physicist and engineer Michael J. Kelly

Climate change is a risk because it may affect prosperity and security, and because its consequences are uncertain. The way we understand and describe a risk strongly influences the way in which it is analyzed, with implications for risk management and decision-making. By characterizing climate change as a well-understood problem with a strong consensus, traditional risk management approaches assume that climate change can and ought to be rationally managed, or at the very least contained, and preferably eliminated. However, the diversity of climate-related impact drivers and their complex linkages, various inherent and irreducible uncertainties, ambiguities about the consequences of climate change, and the unequal distribution of exposure and effects across geography and time, confound any simple or uncontested application of traditional risk management approaches.

Characterization of climate change as a simple, tame hazard risk of dose-response (such as regulation of food additives or use of antibiotics in feedstocks) to be controlled via the Precautionary Principle has torqued both the science and the policy process in misleading directions. As a result, the policy process that has evolved over the past several decades is not only inadequate to deal with the risks associated with climate change, but has fueled societal controversies around climate risk.

Human-caused climate change has become a topic of contested politics, with great economic stakes associated with both the problem and its proposed solutions. Guided by the analyses in Parts One and Two on the nature of the climate change problem and scenarios of future climate outcomes, Part Three presents a framework for analyzing climate risks in all of their complexity and ambiguity, toward formulating pragmatic and adaptable policies. Integrative thinking in the context of the tension associated with different perspectives, best practices from risk science and decision-making under deep uncertainty, and focusing on resilience and antifragility can lead to broader risk management frameworks that are politically viable and support human well-being, both now and in the future.