Adaptation L3 Flashcards
What is a risk?
the combination of the probability of an event and its negative consequences
What is a hazard?
a dangerous phenomenon, substance, human activity or condition that may cause loss of life,injury or other health impacts, property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption or environmental damage
What is exposure?
people, property, systems or other elements present in hazard zones that are thereby subject to potential losses
What is vulnerability/
the characteristics or circumstances of a community, system or asset that make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a hazard
What is resilience?
the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from
What is a response?
Actions taken in response to climate change
can be both mitigation and adaption
What is an example of the following in the context of a flood risk assessment
- probability
-consequence
-characterisation
- risk to people
Probabilty of an extreme hydormeterological condition eg. rainfall, flow, tide level
Consequence - the harm/damage to people and property that occurs during the flood
typically characterised in terms of the depth of flooding that occurs for each property - e.g. house in the flood plain, and the economic damage caused by flooding in a house too that depth - exposure
risk to people are typically characterised in terms of the coverage of insurance
What are some assumptions behind a damage function?
- the flows are stationary - i.e. assuming that future predictions will happen in the same world that we are in today but it is not cc will change the likelihood of damage events happening
- the economics losses are well characterised by the damage function
- economic damage is the only aspect of risk that we are concerned about
What are the three key metrics in quantified risk-based decision making and how do you quantify them?
Benefits are damages avoided relative to the basline
net present value = PV(benefits) -PV(costs)
benefit-cost ratio = PV(benefits)/PV(Costs)
What are some of the challenges associated with a global climate risk assessment?
- non-economic losses are big and difficult to quantify
- damage function is uncertain due to quantity and breadth of risks
- v little information about the future
- limited data about global hazards
In the context of climate change where can risks arise?
from potential impacts of climate change as well as the human responses to climate change
What are the key consideration sin a risk matric for climate and socio-economic processes?
Climate
- nature variability
-anthropogenic climate change
SE
- SE pathways
-adaptation or mitigation actions
-governance
What are the three sides of the three sided propeller by the IPCC?
hazard
vulnerability
exposure
What is a critical characteristic to understand about risks?
risks do not occur in isolation
interact across different sectors, times, spaces and have multiple different response options
time is important because ability to react to risks diminishes if the same risk occurs repeatedly
e.g. pandemic and cc = compound risk or cascading risks - drought leading to lower harvest leading to food insecurity
What is a key risk?
defined as a potentially sever risk and therefore especially relevant to the interpretation of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system
Why are key risks potentially severe?
while come could already reflect dangerous interference now
more typically they become severe over time due to changes in the nature of hazards
and/or the exposure/vulnerability of societies or ecosystems to that hazard
and/or become sever due to the adverse consequences of adaptation or mitigation responses to the risk
BUT ALSO by the values, which determine the importance of a risk
nb. all of this v subjective and cannot be measured objectively
What are four key considerations in key risks?
- magnitude of adverse consequences
-likelihood of adverse consequences - temporal characteristics of the risk
- ability to respond to the risk
Can you give some examples of represetnative key risks?
Risks to…
- low-lying coasts
- terrestrial and ocean ecosystems
- critical infrastructure
- living standards
- human health
- food security
- water security
- peace and human mobility
What are some of the reasons for concern
risks to/associated with….
- unique and threatened systems
- extreme weather events
- the disruption of impacts
- global aggregate impacts
- large-scale singular events
n.b. these have changed over time - vulnerability of systems and humans have been underestimated as well as the lack of consideration for adaption in previous conceptualisation
How do we assess risks globally
Step 1 - literature - read and anlyse existing literature - but this is dependent on what part of the world you are looking at heterogenous literature coverage
Step 2 - assessment of uncertainty - research data and look at the confidence of the risk assessment
what is the actual basis of assessment for these risks that have been identified
Step 3 - expert eliciation
- facilitate judgements about what level of climate change might be dangerous by aggregating risks from various sectors considering hazards, exposures, vulnerabilities, capacities to adapt
What is a risk assessment?
the potential for a chosen activity or action to lead to an undesirable outcome
What are the key features of a risk assessment?
- deals with activities or actions inlcuding the choice of inaction
- focuses upon outcomes that we value
- contains notions of probability - or potential - and consequences - the undesirability of the outcome
- implies the need to value undesirable outcomes
- recognise that perceptions of risk have a material impact on choices
- is forward-looking - outcomes that are observed are realisation of a risk
- provides a rational basis for deciding upon actions, by trading off between costs and risks
What are the issues associated with the global disaster data base?
EM-DAT is a comprehensive data base about natural hazards and the deaths associated
however there are huge parts of the world with a lack of data recorded for heatwaves - do we assume that nothing has happened -noooo
What are some asects of environmental vulnerability?>
- air pollution
-biodiverity loss
-deforestation
-desertification
-land-use change
-water pollution
what are some socioeconomic factors to consider in vulnerability
- growing inequality
- deographic change
-science investment
-human im/mobility
-urbanisation
What are some suseptabilty factors to consider in vulnerability?
- social infrastructure
- political commitment
-socio-econoic conditions
-indvidiaul factors
-population health status
What are the key elements of adaptation readiness
Social rediness - social inequalty, ICT infrastructure, education and innovation
economic readiness - world bank doing business indicators
governance readiness - potlical stability and non-violence, control of corruption, rule of law, regulatory quality
What are some key risks that we don’t fully understand yet
impacts on mental health and conflict and violence
Is cc causing conflicts?
the assessment is that cc is playing a role but adaption is v low but there is low confidence in this assessment due ot the complexity of factors that lead to armed conflict
disentangling the role of cc is v challenging
but the impact of droughts on conflict could be a correlation and not cuasation
