Transcript of a multi‑speaker discussion (video) about understanding and communicating climate risk, focused on workshops run with the COP26 presidency and the British Foreign Office. Core themes: urgency to mitigate, the need to localize and co‑design risk assessments, involve policymakers early, and pair risk assessments with actionable solutions to motivate decision makers.
Chapters
Climate risk is really all of the issues that are related to the various ways the climate is changing around us. It really all comes down to the trade offs between going along as we are business as usual and the damage that say extreme weather is going to do, the damage that rising sea levels are going to do, that stronger storms are going to do. And then look to the future and see how can we do better.
If we understand climate risk better, we can prepare for it better. We can make our society and our cities and our populations more resilient. But understanding climate risk is also important for motivating action.
As it stands, we currently have less than a 5% chance of staying below 2 degrees worth of warming, after which runaway climate change could kick in. The impacts of climate change are like nothing decision makers have had to consider before. And the challenge of presenting robust science versus accessible information for time constrained decision makers is acute.
We worked with the COP26 presidency and the British Foreign Office, specifically their Science and Innovation Network, to hold workshops in 13 of the G20 countries. Given what we know about the scope and scale of the problem, there should be urgency to mitigate. But we haven't seen that. And we're trying to understand why this.
Workshop exists, to try to figure out how to deliver the right message so at least it is acknowledged as a problem. We're sitting on a wealth of knowledge. We have all the science down, it's just not getting delivered. And not getting delivered means not enough policymakers are making the right decision.
Being able to incorporate and include all spheres of society, to get their perspective of the lived experiences that exist within the communities that we live in, to be able to draft policies and implement policies that are very relatable, very applicable to the daily lives that we live.
It was surprising to me how many themes were consistent in every single workshop. One of those was the need to localize and customize risk assessments to be very relevant to specific geographies or specific sectors. Another takeaway was the need to co design risk assessments that came up in almost every single workshop in one way or another. The need to get policymakers involved at the beginning and make sure there's an audience for the risk assessment before it's even begun. Another very interesting takeaway was the need to pair risk assessments with solutions. We heard again and again that if risk assessments are presented on their own, they are depressing, they are overwhelming sometimes, and if they're not paired with productive pathways, then they're going to be pushed to the side.
Understanding and analyzing and deeper studying climate change risks and channeling this information to decision makers both in the private and the public sector is fundamental to design both the public policies for the future and also to design the future of economic decisions that would bring accuracy and more economic success to the private sector in the years to come.
I think what is perhaps getting more traction now is that we're able to connect the dots between just saying, you know, we're going to see more of these kinds of events happen, putting numbers on them in terms of money and that is what policymakers understand now that.
We'Ve come through these workshops. We understand how to make climate risk assessments better we understand how to make them more useful we understand how to make them more actionable we understand how to make them more relevant. I hope that better climate risk assessments help political leaders really understand the severity of the challenge we're facing. This is a crisis and they should act like it's a crisis and we need to figure out a way to deliver this information in a way that explains.
