How to Think About Climate Change Responses: On Organizing One’s Thoughts

Abstract

Thinking about responding to climate change and its associated risks is an enormous challenge. The climate system is complex. Economic systems are complex. Social and political systems are complex. And they all converge to make it impossible to consider any response without a thought template that can organize a plethora of plans, policies, and programs into a coherent and consistent toolkit. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change authored such a template in 2007: “Responding to climate change involves an iterative risk management process that includes both mitigation and adaptation and takes into account climate change damages, co-benefits, sustainability, equity, and attitudes toward risk” – 30 words that make the concept of risk the essential lens through which to assess the past and prepare for the future. This chapter takes most of the nouns as signposts for conducting rigorous and comparable analyses climate action at multiple spatial and temporal scales – from local to state to nation to planet; from community to institution to government to society; and from days to months to years to decades to centuries. Tens of thousands of researchers, decision-makers, and opinion-makers as well as billions of people all need the risk management lens and the various signposts to put their work into context and promote conversation across scale and perspective. The point of this chapter is to offer some expansion of the IPCC declaration that will hopefully be helpful in making their collective efforts more valuable than the sum of their individual efforts taking one at a time.