Understanding Climate Change Risks

This book provides a no-nonsense discussion of the challenges, pitfalls and practicalities of assessing climate change risks in the context of national and regional scale or sector-specific assessments. It focuses on evaluating future risks from climate change, in particular a discussion of different approaches and how these may or may not be effective in certain contexts, based on real-life experiences. Understanding Climate Change Risks is not a manual for adaptation planning or adaptation policy. Assessing risks, however, does need to be grounded in the purpose of the resultant decision-making processes, predominantly related to adaptation planning and building adaptive capacity. This book discusses how a risk assessment can enable effective adaptation planning and how issues such as autonomous adaptation and adaptive capacity may be included within the risk assessment process. Aspects of adaptation planning which are closely related to the risk assessment process (such as cost-benefit and multi-criteria analyses) will also be covered.