Climate risk management requires explicit representation of societal trade-offs

Gregory Garner (), Patrick Reed and Klaus Keller

Climatic Change, 2016, vol. 134, issue 4, 713-723

Abstract: Strategies for managing climate-change risks impact diverse stakeholder groups that possess potentially conflicting preferences. Basic physics and economics suggest that reconciling all of these preference conflicts may not be possible. Moreover, different climate risk management strategies can yield diverse and potentially severe impacts across different global stakeholders. These preference conflicts and their uncertain impacts require an explicit understanding of the trade-offs that emerge across different risk management strategies. Traditionally, integrated assessment models (IAMs) typically aggregate the stakeholders’ preferences across the entire globe into a single, a priori defined utility function. This framing hides climate risk management trade-offs as well as the inherent stakeholder compromises implicit to the resulting single “optimal” expected utility solution. Here, we analyze a simple IAM to quantify and visualize the multidimensional trade-offs among four objectives representing global concerns: (i) global economic productivity, (ii) reliable temperature stabilization, (iii) climate damages, and (iv) abatement costs. We quantify and visualize the trade-offs across these objectives and demonstrate how a traditional optimal expected utility policy implicitly eliminates many relevant policy pathways. Explicit trade-off analysis provides a richer context for exploring conflicting global policy preferences and clarifies the implications of alternative climate risk mitigation policies to better inform negotiated compromises. Copyright The Author(s) 2016

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-016-1607-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:134:y:2016:i:4:p:713-723

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-016-1607-3

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().