Strategic appraisal of environmental risks: a contrast between the United Kingdom's Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and its Committee on Radioactive Waste Management

Simon Dietz and Alec Morton

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: In this article, we compare two high-profile strategic policy reviews undertaken for the U.K. government on environmental risks: radioactive waste management and climate change. These reviews took very different forms, both in terms of analytic approach and deliberation strategy. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was largely an exercise in expert modeling, building, within a cost-benefit framework, an argument for immediate reductions in carbon emissions. The Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, on the other hand, followed a much more explicitly deliberative and participative process, using multicriteria decision analysis to bring together scientific evidence and stakeholder and public values. In this article, we ask why the two reviews were different, and whether the differences are justified. We conclude that the differences were mainly due to political context, rather than the underpinning science, and as a consequence that, while in our view “fit for purpose,” they would both have been stronger had they been less different. Stern's grappling with ethical issues could have been strengthened by a greater degree of public and stakeholder engagement, and the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management's handling of issues of uncertainty could have been strengthened by the explicitly probabilistic framework of Stern.

Keywords: climate change; cost-benefit analysis; discounting; multicriteria decision analysis; public engagement; radioactive waste management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Risk Analysis, January, 2011, 31(1), pp. 129-142. ISSN: 0272-4332

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/31890/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

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:ehl:lserod:31890

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().