Executive Summary

Actions that range from incremental steps to transformational changes are essential for reducing risk from weather and climate extremes (high agreement, robust evidence). [8.6, 8.7] Incremental steps aim to improve efficiency within existing technological, governance, and value systems, whereas transformation may involve alterations of fundamental attributes of those systems. The balance between incremental and transformational approaches depends on evolving risk profiles and underlying social and ecological conditions. Disaster risk, climate change impacts, and capacity to cope and adapt are unevenly distributed. Vulnerability is often concentrated in poorer countries or groups, although the wealthy can also be vulnerable to extreme events. Where vulnerability is high and adaptive capacity relatively low, changes in extreme climate and weather events can make it difficult for systems to adapt sustainably without transformational changes. Such transformations, where they are required, are facilitated through increased emphasis on adaptive management, learning, innovation, and leadership.

Evidence indicates that disaster risk management and adaptation policy can be integrated, reinforcing, and supportive – but this requires careful coordination that reaches across domains of policy and practice (high agreement, medium evidence). [8.2, 8.3, 8.5, 8.7] Including disaster risk management in resilient and sustainable development pathways is facilitated through integrated, systemic approaches that enhance capacity to cope with, adapt to, and shape unfolding processes of change, while taking into consideration multiple stressors, different prioritized values, and competing policy goals.

Introduction

In his 1978 book, Reconciling Man with the Environment, Eric Ashby sought to address what he considered to be one of the most critical issues of his time: the protection of the environment. He believed that by continually making difficult policy choices and confronting the associated dilemmas, humans would gradually arrive at a fuller understanding of their environment and thus a more anticipatory approach to managing it. This reconciliation, he contended, would be achieved not by ‘heroic long-term megadecisions’ but by ‘the cumulative effect of wise medium-term microdecisions, each … clarifying the shape of the decision that needs to follow’ (Ashby 1978: 87).

Ashby was one of those rare individuals in public life who somehow managed to combine a lifelong career as a scientist (he was, among other things, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society), with equally important roles in policy making. This sensitised him to the realpolitik of decision making.

Climate change is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of this century. Once a matter that only preoccupied a fairly select group of atmospheric scientists, in the past few years it has forcefully entered the political mainstream in many industrialised states, demanding a political and policy response at all levels of governance. Not only is climate change scientifically very complex but it also raises very challenging governance issues. This is because addressing climate change and its consequences requires governors to make policy interventions that will deeply affect production and consumption decisions right across the world. In this book we focus on the policy choices and their associated governance dilemmas that are constitutive of these interventions. By using the term ‘governance’ instead of government, we seek to draw attention to the changing context in which these policy choices have been (and will in the foreseeable future be) made. So, whereas in the past, governments made and implemented the key choices, today governing – at least in Europe – is undertaken among a wider array of actors, including those in the private sector.

In the first chapter, we argue that governing is a purposive activity, which involves making difficult choices between alternative options supported by different groups of actors who commonly subscribe to values that are partly and sometimes wholly incommensurate.