Reframing climate change assessments around risk: recommendations for the US National Climate Assessment

Abstract

The web link listed in Footnote 11 is incorrect. The correct link is www.federalregister.gov/documents/ 2015/07/31/2015-18781/establishment-of-theadvisory-committee-for-the-sustained-nationalclimate-assessment-and. ORCID iDSC P Weaver https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4016-5451Abstract Climate change is a risk management challenge for society, with uncertain but potentially severe outcomes affecting natural and human systems, across generations. Managing climate-related risks will be more difficult without a base of knowledge and practice aimed at identifying and evaluating specific risks, and their likelihood and consequences, as well as potential actions to promote resilience in the face of these risks. We suggest three improvements to the process of conducting climate change assessments to better characterize risk and inform risk management actions.

Advances in risk assessment for climate change adaptation policy

“…Similarly, risk assessment has also been highlighted as a key procedure at national scale to facilitate targeted adaptation strategies and coordinated risk governance (e.g. USA [24]). …”

A Probabilistic Risk Assessment of the National Economic Impacts of Regulatory Drought Management on Irrigated Agriculture

“…In general, existing national climate risk assessments that consider drought-relevant risk metrics only explore a small number of future emission scenarios, such changes in soil moisture (United States;Wehner et al, 2017), water resource availability (United Kingdom; HR Wallingford, 2015), or agricultural land suitability (United Kingdom;ECI et al, 2013;Keay et al, 2013), but lack a description of the full range of probabilities and the related economic impacts. Dealing with low-probability and high-consequence outcomes (i.e., the tails of probability distributions) has also been identified as a challenge for climate risk quantification (Weaver et al, 2017). With probabilistic models, a large number of synthetic events can be reproduced providing a more complete picture of the full spectrum of future risks than with historical data (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015).…”

“…Decision makers need to understand how climate change may interfere with their plans and compromise their objectives, so they can adapt existing policies and develop new strategies (Weaver et al, 2017). From the regulatory side, changes in water abstraction management as an adaptation measure to climate change are being implemented in many areas around the world, such as in the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment (Wuebbles et al, 2017), the Climate Change Research Plan for California (CalEPA, 2015), and National Adaptation Plans by developing countries such as Brazil (Ministry of Environment, 2016).…”

Risk measures and the distribution of damage curves for 600 European coastal cities

“…This is a very important attribute of the ES. Indeed, it illustrates the interest in understanding the shape of the distribution of damages as well as the tail (Heal and Millner 2014, Weaver et al 2017, Etkin et al 2018. In this case, the 3-meter defences will protect the cities for a SLR of this level but will not eliminate all the residual risk as represented by ES.…”