Recently long-term flood insurance contracts with a duration of 5, 10 or 15 years have been proposed as a solution for covering flood risk and mitigating increasing flood losses. Establishing a long-term relation between the policyholder and the insurer can provide better incentives to reduce risk through undertaking damage mitigation measures.
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The overall objective of this study is to explore synergies and trade-offs in mainstreaming responses to climate change within development planning and assistance, with natural resource management as an overarching theme.
The selection of climate policy has to be made in an extremely uncertain environment: both benefits and costs of a particular climate policy are unknown and in the best case could be described by the probability distribution of various outcomes.
Risk assessment provides an opportunity to manage dam safety using a framework of risk evaluation that is used for other types of hazardous facilities and technologies. This paper contains a presentation of risk evaluation from a broad perspective but with application to dam safety.
While mitigation has been the dominant policy response to climate change in the global community, practitioners and scholars have argued that significant climate change will occur even in the event of dramatic emissions reductions in the near term, thus adaptation is vital to address these impacts and to maintain or restore ecosystem resilience to multiple stresses.
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) effect has been found to be associated with regional climate variations in many regions of the world, and, in turn, with variation in crop yields.
Can the existing and very extensive private sector organizations provide those at risk from climate change with adequate insurance cover? If not, why not? What changes in market institutions might be appropriate in this case? This paper is about these and related questions. In attempting to answer them, we deal with many different aspects of the theory of risk-bearing.
The U.S. road network is one of the nation’s most important capital assets and is vital to the functioning of the U.S. economy. Maintaining this asset involves approximately $134 billion of government funds annually from Federal, State, and local agencies.
This study was commissioned as part of IMACC to look at approaches for the economic assessment of climate change adaptation options. Special emphasis is being placed on the issue of including uncertainty in the economic assessment and respective approaches. The study’s terms of reference (ToRs), define three main tasks: 1.
The Committee on Safety Criteria for Dams was requested to report on the selection of appropriate flood and earthquake occurrences to be considered in design of dams and safety evaluation of dams. This report represents a general consensus of the views and conclusions of the committee.
To what extent does economic analysis of climate change depend on low-probability, high-impact events? This question has received a great deal of attention lately, with the contention increasingly made that climate damage could be so large that societal willingness to pay to avoid extreme outcomes should overwhelm other seemingly important assumptions, notably on time preference.
We compare ensembles of water supply and demand projections from 10 global hydrological models and six global gridded crop models.
Climate policy uncertainty has decisive influence on energy sector strategies. Potential stranded climate-energy investments may be enormous. Remote sensing can improve our understanding of the climate system and thus better inform climate policy and reduce associated uncertainties. We develop an integrated energy-portfolio model to value these uncertainties.
This position paper provides a review of literature applicable to risk based prioritization and decision making relative to the operations and maintenance of dams and associated navigational locks. Particular attention is paid to methodologies developed or used by USACE.
The main objective of the PESETA (Projection of Economic impacts of climate change in Sectors of the European Union based on boTtom-up Analysis) project is to contribute to a better understanding of the possible physical and economic effects induced by climate change in Europe over the 21st century.
Our main thesis in this article will be to offer a new classification of risk types and management strategies that promises scientific accuracy, a reflection of social diversity, and political feasibility.
The article introduces the notion of adaptiveness and discusses the role of social learning in it. Adaptiveness refers to the capacity of a social actor or social– ecological system to adapt in response to, or in anticipation of, changes in the environment.
This book deals with the difficulties that face the economics of adaptation. Critical issues include: uncertainty; baselines; reversibility, flexibility and adaptive management; distributional impacts; discount rates and time horizons; mixing monetary and non-monetary evaluations and limits to the use of cost-benefit analysis; economy-wide impacts and cross-sectoral linkages.
The MEDIATION project guides researchers, policy advisors and experts to suitable climate change adaptation methods and tools for a wide range of questions and from various disciplines and perspectives. The project involves 11 partners and 11 case studies. Summaries of five of these case studies can be found in the present publication.
The costs of climate change policies are estimated and their implications discussed in many parts of the IPCC’s Assessment Report. The use of consistent cost concepts across the TAR is important, in order to facilitate comparability across different cost assessment approaches.
Describes annotated guidelines for the preparation of national adaptation programmes of action
We demonstrate that when the future path of the discount rate is uncertain and highly correlated, the distant future should be discounted at significantly lower rates than suggested by the current rate. We then use two centuries of US interest rate data to quantify this effect.
The impacts of global climate change on different aspects of humanity’s diverse life-support systems are complex and often difficult to predict. To facilitate policy decisions on mitigation and adaptation strategies, it is necessary to understand, quantify, and synthesize these climate-change impacts, taking into account their uncertainties.
The notion ―risk governance‖ refers to an integrated concept on how to deal with public risks in general, and so-called complex, ambiguous and uncertain risks in particular. These ideas have been informed by interdisciplinary research drawing from sociological and psychological research on risk, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and research by policy scientists and legal scholars.
The project work was divided into three sub-projects: 1) Risk Assessment (Analysis), 2) Dam Break Hazard Analysis and 3) Emergency/Rescue Action Planning. In addition to these subprojects the International Seminar and Workshop was arranged on October 2-5, 2000 in Seinäjoki and a study visit to the Emergency Services College in Kuopio on October 1, 2000.
In 1999, the UNFCCC Secretariat took a first step towards disseminating information on methods and tools when it produced a report entitled Compendium of Decision Tools to Evaluate Strategies for Adaptation to Climate Change. Since then, the adaptation assessment process has changed considerably and in some ways grown more sophisticated.
Over the past decades, significant experience has been gained in demand-driven research on climate change in many countries. In the Netherlands, a competitive call for proposals for large research programmes at the interface between policy, science and private sector was issued in 2001.
Given the large uncertainties regarding potential damages from climate change and the significant but also uncertain costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the debate over a policy responce is often framed as a choice of acting now or waiting until the uncertainty is reduced.
With climate change as prototype example, this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of lowprobability, high-impact catastrophes. Even when updated by Bayesian learning, uncertain structural parameters induce a critical “tail fattening” of posterior-predictive distributions.
This study addresses the economics of climate change in selected countries in the East Asian region, focusing on the People’s Republic of China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and Mongolia.