In search of compromise among climate risk management strategies

Balancing the impacts of climate change risks for all involved may not be within the realm of economics or physics, but a novel approach may help to achieve a better compromise, according to SCRiM researchers at Penn State and Cornell.

“Different climate risk management strategies can yield diverse and potentially severe impacts across different global stakeholders,” the researchers said in a recent issue of Climatic Change. They add that solving this problem requires clear knowledge of the trade-offs across different risk management strategies.

“Since the Paris talks, a lot of attention has gone to mitigation of carbon dioxide, but this won’t always work,” said Gregory Garner, postdoctoral fellow in Earth and Environmental Systems Institute in Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. “Traditionally, analysts use integrated assessment models that aggregate all the individual preferences across the globe into a single function. What we found is that this formulation hides significant trade-offs relevant to a set of diverse stakeholders.”

See the publication in Climatic Change.

See full story in Penn State News.