Climate Uncertainty And Risk

Our climate is changing. Less certain, however, is the timing and magnitude of climate change, and the cost of transition to a low-carbon world. This book identifies how climate change policy uncertainty may affect investment behaviour in the power sector. For power companies, where capital stock is intensive and long-lived, those risks rank among the biggest and can create an incentive to delay investment.

This book focuses on integrated disaster risk reduction arising out of climate change and shows how communities build resilience through adaptive and transformative strategies at the local and global levels. It integrates disaster risk, uncertainty, and maladaptation to climate change with evidence from empirical research and a systematic review of existing studies. The book also proposes two important contributions, which makes it distinctive. First, it gives a systematic review of the literature to capture the changing context and concept of risk, uncertainty, and maladaptation to climate change. Second, it uses case studies from around the globe to demonstrate the ways that communities have fostered to build resilience to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Climate change is profoundly altering our world in ways that pose major risks to human societies and natural systems. We have entered the Climate Casino and are rolling the global-warming dice, warns economist William Nordhaus. But there is still time to turn around and walk back out of the casino, and in this essential book the author explains how.