1,721,100 research outputs found
Flood insurance as a response to environmental hazard
No full textInsurance against the impact of environmental hazard provides a means of recovering from financial loss, but can also be used to encourage the mitigation of such losses. Consequently, insurance can be an effective response to the flood hazard. In principle, high premiums should dis- courage movement onto the floodplain, whilst premium differentials could also be used to encourage the adoption of measures to reduce flood damages. Furthermore, insurance can be made conditional upon the adoption of either individual or collective mitigation measures. On the other hand, however, the availability of insurance may stimulate floodplain encroachment, and the realisation that losses will be reimbursed may discourage loss mitigation. The United States National Flood Insurance Program is an attempt to use the potential of flood insurance to improve response to flooding. In- surance is only sold in communities which have adopted floodplain regu- lations, and variable risk-based rates are applied to new structures in order to discourage encroachment. Whilst flood insurance in the United States has been dominated by governmenj-;; actions and is integrated into floodplain management, insurance in Britain is solely in the hands of the private insurance industry and is not connected with hazard mitigation. Flood cover is a standard inclusion in comprehensive household and small business policies, and is very rarely refused. Competition during the 1970s and 1980s in Britain led to the abandonment of higher premiums for floodprone households. There is no active encouragement of flood-proofing for residences, although companies occasionally make insurance for com- mercial properties conditional upon the raising of stock. Incorporation of flood cover into standard household policies in Britain means that possession of flood cover is not indicative of conscious res- ponse to the flood hazard. However, insurance coverage remains variable, and surveys in Selby, York, Gillingham and Tonbridge showed that lower status, tenant and pensioner households were less likely to have any property insurance cover. Flood relief is an alternative means of pro- viding for recovery from loss. In Britain it is limited to aid from public subscription funds, and since such aid cannot be guaranteed flood relief has an insignificant effect on insurance possession. Temporal variations in flood loss imply that long-term premium income must be sufficient to cover long-term claims payments, and consequently premiums must be based on average annual flood losses. A method for estimating average annual damages based on standard hazard and damage data is presented. It is concluded that the study of insurance provision in Britain aids academic understanding of overall response to hazard, but future changes in the availability of flood insurance may give the studies a more practical value.</p
Response to 'The Stern Review: A Dual Critique'.
No full textThis article is a response to the articles in the previous issue of World Economics by Carter et al. and Byatt et al., which criticized the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change’s assessment of the potential impacts of climate change. The authors demonstrate that the Stern Review does not underestimate the extent of uncertainty, and does not introduce bias by ignoring the effects of adaptation. The assessment does represent the effects of different socioeconomic futures on impact, and does explain the key sources of uncertainty. The indicators of impact used in the assessment either take adaptation into account (food security, coastal flooding) or represent exposure to impact, and hence indicate a demand for adaptation if impacts are to be avoided
Successful adaptation to climate change across scales
No full textClimate change impacts and responses are presently observed in physical and ecological systems. Adaptation to these impacts is increasingly being observed in both physical and ecological systems as well as in human adjustments to resource availability and risk at different spatial and societal scales. We review the nature of adaptation and the implications of different spatial scales for these processes. We outline a set of normative evaluative criteria for judging the success of adaptations at different scales. We argue that elements of effectiveness, efficiency, equity and legitimacy are important in judging success in terms of the sustainability of development pathways into an uncertain future. We further argue that each of these elements of decision-making is implicit within presently formulated scenarios of socio-economic futures of both emission trajectories and adaptation, though with different weighting. The process by which adaptations are to be judged at different scales will involve new and challenging institutional processes
Adapting to climate change: perspectives across scales
No full textThere has been an explosion of interest in adaptation to climate change over the past five years. Since initial work for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (Smit and Pilifosova, 2001 B. Smit and O. Pilifosova, Adaptation to climate change in the context of sustainable development and equity, J.J. McCarthy, O. Canziani, N.A. Leary, D.J. Dokken, K.S. White, Editors , Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. IPCC Working Group II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2001), pp. 877–912. | View Record in Scopus | | Cited By in Scopus (1)Smit and Pilifosova, 2001) demonstrated that adaptation is both important and complex, there has been an increasing focus on documenting adaptations as they happen and explaining the processes by which adaptation can occur, hopefully successfully. The explosion of interest has therefore occurred for two main reasons. The first reason is because adaptation is happening today; decisions are being made in boardrooms, living rooms and government offices about how to adapt to current changes. From decisions on premiums by insurance companies, through to decisions to engineer buildings for a warmer climate, adaptation is occurring. These decisions and processes of adaptation often proceed even without explicit recognition that the changes in variability faced are consistent with or attributable to human induced climate change (Reilly and Schimmelpfennig, 2000; Kane and Yohe, 2000). The question is being asked: what is effective adaptation?The second reason for increasing interest in adaptation to climate change relates to the global discussions on the role of adaptation as an alternative to mitigation, i.e., minimising the causes of human-induced climate change. This issue is often framed as whether adaptation can substitute for mitigation and provide more ‘breathing space’ for global emissions trajectories, rather than in placing risk management as central to the global problematic and the recognition of the joint determinants of the ability to adapt and to mitigate ( [Yohe, 2001] and [Yohe, 2004] ; Yohe et al., 2004).In both of these areas of concern (effective adaptation decision-making and global response), issues of future potential adaptation, its social and institutional organisation, and technical and social limits to adaptation are critical. These debates uniform global negotiations on both responsibility and funding for adaptation (Smith et al., 2003). They also impinge on the relative role of different stakeholders in actual adaptation of implementation.Despite this growth in demand for information on adaptation options and the potential for adaptation as a response to climate change, so far only two major collections on adaptation have so far been published (a special issue of Climatic Change published in 2000 (Kane and Yohe, 2000) and a book edited by Smith et al. (2003)).This special issue of Global Environmental Change presents some emerging conceptual and empirical advances in the understanding of adaptation to climate change, at a range of spatial scales. These include explicit consideration of the role of climate information in adaptation planning—who knows what and who needs to know what for effective adaptation actions to proceed? Empirical evidence on how information on climate risks has been used in adaptation decisions demonstrates (in the papers by Conway and Tompkins) that adaptation proceeds in a piecemeal fashion with both individual interests and collective senses of risk involved in using scenarios or experience in implementing change.Adger et al. (2005a) examine criteria for the definition of “successful” adaptation, showing how they vary with spatial scale and are interpreted and weighted differently by different interest groups. Brooks et al. (2005) and Haddad (2005) both explore factors affecting adaptive capacity at the national scale. Brooks et al. (2005) describe a set of calibrated indicators of adaptive capacity, showing that adaptive capacity is associated primarily not with measures of wealth, but indicators of governance, civil and political rights, and literacy. Haddad (2005), however, shows how national adaptive capacity varies with national socio-political goals, and different weightings given to different indicators produce different maps of adaptive capacity. Conway (2005) and Tompkins (2005) examine how responses to past climatic variability in the Nile Basin (variability in river flows) and the Cayman Islands (hurricanes) influence adaptation to future climate change. Tompkins (2005), for example, shows how support networks, strong governance and willingness to learn have increased the resilience of the Cayman Islands to hurricane impact. This resilience was witnessed after Hurricane Ivan passed through the Caribbean in September 2004. In comparison with other islands which experienced similar winds, rain and flooding, the Cayman Islands fared relatively well. Nonetheless, learning is on-going as the recovery process has proved difficult and not without problems. The roles of local institutions and governance structures are also illustrated by Næss colleagues (2005) review of municipal response to the changing flood hazard in Norway: they show how aims and objectives at one level are not necessarily applied at another.Issues of equity and justice are widely discussed in terms of emissions targets, but have only recently become seen to be vitally important in developing adaptation strategies (Adger et al., 2005b). Thomas and Twyman (2005) show how the distribution of the costs and benefits of adapting to climate change in resource-dependent societies in southern Africa depend on the interactions between inequitable natural resource use policies and community-based natural resource management programmes. Finally, Dessai et al. (2005) consider the use of climate scenarios for adaptation planning in practice, presenting real-world examples of different ways in which scenarios can be used: they show that the role played by scenarios depends on the approach to adaptation adopted and the financial and technical capacity to handle scenario information.The papers in this special issue address a diversity of adaptation issues and take a range of approaches. This emphasises and illustrates the diversity of the factors affecting adaptation and the ability to adapt: these are based not only on geographical context, but also on social and political conditions and drivers. Taken together, the papers emphasise the significance of scale in understanding, explaining and enhancing adaptation (see also Wilbanks, 2002). Scale affects the criteria defining “successful” adaptation, and determines the relevance of different factors influencing adaptive capacity: indicators calculated at one scale may hide substantial variations in adaptive capacity at another.Scale affects the fundamental conceptualisation of equity and justice. Again, assessments of the differential burden of adaptation within a country would offer a different perspective than assessments of differences between countries. Scale determines the construction and the implementation of adaptation policies, with actions and plans at the national level significantly affected by local institutional issues. Finally, scale influences the appropriate technical tools for the assessment of adaptation options. A lesson from this collection of papers is that complexity in adaptation is brought about by multiple scales of interaction between human and environmental systems. This complexity has significant implications for public policy given that decision-makers within governance hierarchies are always reticent to embrace institutional solutions at lower levels of scale. At the same time, local solutions are not always readily scaleable to other levels of decision-making. Adaptation presents formidable challenges to governance, science and ultimately to the sustainability of society and the environment on which it depends
Eliciting information from experts on the likelihood of rapid climate change
No full textThe threat of so-called rapid or abrupt climate change has generated considerable public interest because of its potentially significant impacts. The collapse of the North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, for example, would have potentially catastrophic effects on temperatures and sea level, respectively. But how likely are such extreme climatic changes? Is it possible actually to estimate likelihoods? This article reviews the societal demand for the likelihoods of rapid or abrupt climate change, and different methods for estimating likelihoods: past experience, model simulation, or through the elicitation of expert judgments. The article describes a survey to estimate the likelihoods of two characterizations of rapid climate change, and explores the issues associated with such surveys and the value of information produced. The surveys were based on key scientists chosen for their expertise in the climate science of abrupt climate change. Most survey respondents ascribed low likelihoods to rapid climate change, due either to the collapse of the Thermohaline Circulation or increased positive feedbacks. In each case one assessment was an order of magnitude higher than the others. We explore a high rate of refusal to participate in this expert survey: many scientists prefer to rely on output from future climate model simulations.<br/
Climate resilience: interpretations of the term and implications for practice
No full textThe term ‘resilience’, which is integral to the UK Climate Resilience Programme(Gov)UK Climate Resilience Programme (UKCR) (UKCR), has been used increasingly in academic, practice and public discourse around climate change, and crises more generally. The term’s appeal comes from its ability to frame crises not as uncontrollable and uncertain phenomena to be feared, but as challenges over which one can triumph, with the potential for improving society
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Assessing the costs of adaptation to climate change: a review of the UNFCCC and other recent estimates
No full textThis is an evaluation of estimates of the costs of adaptation made by the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2007 and by some preceding studies
(UNFCCC, 2007; Stern, 2006; World Bank, 2006; Oxfam, 2007; UNDP, 2007). The costs have
been used as the basis for discussion regarding the levels of investment needed for adaptation to
climate change. They have been influential in the debate concerning funding for climate change
and it is important, therefore, that such estimates of cost are as robust as possible. The purpose of
this report is to assess these estimates and consider ways to improve them in the future.
The UNFCCC report was based on a set of commissioned studies (UNFCCC background
papers, 2007). These took place over a short period dictated by the timescale of the UNFCCC
process and the need to report the results to the next Conference of the Parties, so there was no
time for independent review of a draft of the report.
It is important, therefore, to recall the objectives of the UNFCCC report and the caveats that the
authors ascribed to its conclusions. The study was a preliminary one of the funding, especially the
public funding, estimated to be needed in the year 2030 to meet the challenge of climate change.
It is not a study of the full cost of avoiding all damage. It does not cover some important activities,
and other activities are only partially covered. The authors suggest that their estimates are
probably under-estimates and that much more study is needed.
The purpose of this evaluation is to consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of the
UNFCCC study, so that we can determine what next steps can be taken to improve our
understanding of the issue. It is not our purpose here to develop a revised set of numbers for
the funding of adaptation to climate change, because we believe this requires detailed stud
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