Using Risk Assessment to Inform Adaptation

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Using Risk Assessment to Inform Adaptation
In-session Workshop on Impacts Of, and
Vulnerability and Adaptation To, Climate
Change Hotel Maritim, Bonn, Germany 18 June 2004

• Roger N. Jones

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Risk

• Can be broadly defined as the likelihood of an
  adverse event or outcome
• How does this relate to Article 2 of the UNFCCC?

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Article 2 UNFCCC

• Aims to prevent dangerous
• anthropogenic climate change
• by stabilising greenhouse gas emissions,
• thus allowing
• Ecosystems to adapt naturally
• Food security to be maintained
• Sustainable development to proceed

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Scales of dangerous climate change

• Global thresholds of criticality
• Grounded ice sheet melts,
• N. Hemisphere flips to cold conditions,
• Amazon wilts and burns due to heat and drought
• Global in scale but very unlikely to occur (?
  with ?T)
• Local thresholds of criticality
• Any activity where
• the harm caused exceeds given levels of tolerance
  
• impacts become non-viable with no reasonable
  substitute
• Local in scale, number and severity increasing
  with ?T,
• benefits fewer with ?T

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Linking climate to adaptation over time
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Measuring the ability to cope
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Coping under climate change
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Adapting through the coping range
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Different activities have different adaptive
capacities
Coral Reefs
Developed Country Agriculture
Developing Country Agriculture
Protected Coastal Infrastructure
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Adaptation and mitigation

• Adaptation increases the coping range through
  biological and social means
• Mitigation reduces the magnitude and frequency of
  greenhouse-related climate hazards
• Therefore, they are complementary, not
  interchangeable.
• They also reduce different areas of climate
  uncertainty

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Some major methods

• Natural hazards method
• Risk Hazard Vulnerability
• (what are the likely damages?)
• Vulnerability-based method
• Risk Probability Consequence
• (what is the likelihood of exceeding a given
  state of vulnerability?)
• Policy assessment
• Does a given policy increase or decrease risk
  under climate change?

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Selecting a method

• Natural Hazard
• Probabilities of hazard constrained
• Main drivers known
• Chain of consequences understood
• P(Hazard) Consequences
• Exploratory

• Vulnerability
• Probabilities not constrained
• Many drivers
• Multiple pathways and feedbacks
• P(Vulnerability)
• e.g. critical threshold exceedance
• Normative

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Likelihood of threshold exceedance
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Activities most at risk

• Those where
• critical thresholds are exceeded at low levels of
  global warming,
• adaptive capacity is low and/or adaptation is
  prohibitively expensive, difficult or unknown and
  
• the consequences of exceeding those thresholds
  are judged to be serious

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Resources

• UNDP Adaptation Policy Framework
• www.undp.org/cc/apf.htm
• UKCIP Willow and Connell (2003)
• www.ukcip.org.uk/risk_uncert