Managing Risk in Climate Change - A Dynamic Perspective

Current debate on climate policy is confounded by the deep uncertainty pertaining to how greenhouse gases affect the global climate and how the global climate change will affect the human ecosystem. Further, the current tools for economic analysis are not capable of satisfactorily dealing with this uncertainty. Quantifying the uncertainties of the climate system is a job for the natural sciences. However, understanding how climate change affects the society and how society should/will respond to climate c hange is an important challenge facing social scientists. The task of integrating the science of quantifying the intrinsic uncertainty of the climate system with the vagaries of societal response requires interdisciplinary research at an advanced level. S cientists have identified several potential ways in which society may be adversely affected by climate change. These adverse effects can only be evaluated probabilistically as the exact occurrence of these events must be extrapolated from imprecise histor ical data and theoretically inferred for those possible effects for which no data exists. The project will employ excellent researchers from several fields in order to integrate scientific knowledge of climate change and economic understanding of policy and impacts on society. This collaboration will lead to the development of numerical models which should facilitate the analysis of the role of uncertainty in the formulation climate policy.