Climate change is an existential and irreversible threat and needs to be managed in a way that effectively eliminates the risk of worst case scenarios. This reality makes traditional economic and cost-benefit analysis, which assumes only marginal and reversible change, completely unsuited to assessing strategic climate policy.

Risk management approaches have been developed in other critical areas like security planning give a robust approach to developing strategy which utilises all available information and usefully frames public political debates over “how much risk we should take?”.

Nick Mabey began research on approaches to decision making under uncertainty at MIT and London Business School and this work informed his input to public debates on mitigation action in the run up to UNFCCC COP 3 in Kyoto.

Nick worked extensively on security issues and climate change policy while in government and at E3G led a team that combined this experience into a major report in 2010 outlining a risk management framework for climate change “Degrees of Risk”; launch presentation here.

Degrees of Risk showed the need to actively manage both the potential for extreme climate risks and tipping points, and the uncertainty in delivering mitigation action, and how this logic should be embedded into climate governance institutions and political debates.

This risk management approach has driven E3G’s work to reform national, European and international climate governance systems so they effectively address extreme risks. E3G has worked with partners to assess how much risk management has been incorporated into the practice of international institutions and supports an ongoing UK—China dialogue on extreme climate risk.

E3G has also taken forward risk management of mitigation pathways with groundbreaking work on risk managing power sector decarbonisation across Europe, risk assessment of EU energy infrastructure choices and work to ensure the security and risk mitigation benefits of power infrastructure and energy demand reduction are fully incorporated into EU decision making.

As decarbonisation deepens, climate risks grow and geopolitical volatility increases it is even more important that governments take a robust, empirical and risk-based approach to managing their climate change interests. The alternative of only managing to best-case outcomes will see continued policy failure in mitigation & adaptation which could undermine the political basis for radical climate action.