Putting the Economics first: revisiting the interpretation of climate models for adaptation decision-making
Abstract
Traditionally, climate change risk assessments have taken a roughly four-stage linear ‘chain’ approach of moving from socioeconomic projections, to climate projections, to primary impacts and then finally onto economic and social impact assessment. Adaptation decisions are then made on the basis of these outputs. The escalation of uncertainty through this chain is well known; resulting in an ‘explosion’ of uncertainties in the final risk assessment. Today, the space of plausible future risk scenarios is growing ever wider with the application of new techniques which aim to explore uncertainty ever more deeply; such as the perturbed physics ensembles used to generate the recent ‘probabilistic’ UK Climate Projections 2009, and the stochastic integrated assessment models, for example PAGE2002. While this uncertainty information is important, the explosion of uncertainty can make decision-making problematic, particularly given that the uncertainty information communicated can not be treated as strictly probabilistic and therefore, is not an easy fit with standard decision-making under uncertainty approaches. Additional problems can arise from the fact that the uncertainty estimated for different components of the ‘chain’ is rarely directly comparable or combinable. Here we demonstrate how ‘putting the economics first’ in risk and adaptation assessments, that is, almost reversing the traditional linear chain of a risk assessment, can collapse the uncertainties. Such an approach forces one to focus on the information requirements for the specific decision, simplifying the assessment. We demonstrate this approach for two case studies: an illustrative coastal village susceptible to storm surge and coastal flooding, and a Caribbean island exposed to wind-related tropical cyclone risks. We reflect on what such a change in approach might mean for the design of climate model experiments for adaptation decision-making.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2009
- Bibcode:
- 2009AGUFMGC41B0763R
- Keywords:
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- 1626 GLOBAL CHANGE / Global climate models;
- 6309 POLICY SCIENCES / Decision making under uncertainty