Climate change risk reduction: decision making in uncertainty

This chapter is an attempt to link the disaster risk reduction and decision making under uncertainty. It is aimed at the disaster risk reduction personnel who are beginning to understand the linkages with climate change. Since this chapter is meant for a book that largely deals with disaster risk reduction and not climate change, the chapter starts with an overview of global environmental problems and compares the trends with that of global climate change. Then, it goes on to explain and characterize the concept of climate risk deriving from the disaster risk management literature. Subsequently, the concept of decision making is introduced as relevant for both mitigation and adaptation to climate change and subsequently explains more about adaptation and the need to consider adaptation consequences within disaster risk management domain. Much of the last part of the chapter heavily borrows from the risk, uncertainty and decision making framework developed by UK-CIP.

Remarks:

The original chapter is available upon request. This book chapter was written and accepted for publication in 2006. This chapter is part of the outputs from the postdoctoral fellowship received by the lead author from Japanese Society for Promotion of Science at Kyoto University during 2005-07.