Global Environmental Risk

Jeanne X. Kasperson, Roger E. Kasperson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136533822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Insurance
• Index: Business

Despite international initiatives such as the Earth Summit in 1992 and ongoing efforts to implement the Kyoto Protocol, human activities continue to register a destructive toll on the planetary environment. At root, research on global environmental risk seeks new pathways for reversing unsustainable trends, curtailing ongoing destructive activities, and creating a life-sustaining planet. This book takes stock of the distinctive challenges posed by global environmental risks, the capacity of knowledge systems to identify and characterize such risks, and the competence of human society to manage the unprecedented complexity. Particular attention trains on engaging, in ways conducive to enhancing social learning and adaptation, the large uncertainties inherent in these risks.

Various chapters enlist different scales of analysis to explore the manifestation and causes of global environmental risks in all the diversity of their regional expression. Throughout, the editors and contributors accord prominence to the vulnerability of people and places to environmental degradation. Understanding vulnerability is a neglected key to assessing the nature of the risks and determining strategies for altering trajectories of threat. Global risk futures, the editors argue, are not intractable, and are still amenable to a risk-analysis enterprise that is democratic in principle, humanistic in concept, and geared to the realities that pertain to the particular societies, locales, and regions that will ultimately bear the risk.

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Part One

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Characterizing global
environmental risks

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Editors' introduction

Are global environmental risks really new risks? If so, in what sense are they new, or how do they differ from risks that societies have faced throughout history? Or is it the global political context in which such risks occur, the fragmented management setting, and the weak international institutions that differ so markedly from other risk situations?

This section addresses the nature of global environmental risks and how they may best be characterized. In the field of risk analysis, the 1990s have been an active period of exploring ways of characterizing and comparing risks. Rightly so, because progress in our ability to identify the essential properties of a given risk (including its perceptual, social, and economic dimensions) is the basis for more systematic and well-founded social engagement of risk. Nearly three decades after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the extent to which societies throughout the world still deal with environmental and health threats in a risque-du-jour fashion is striking. The conclusion from the self-examination by the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA 1987) — that public outcries, media attention, and legislative concerns drive risk-management efforts more than the agency's own assessment of what problems most need attention and are most amenable to control — is a telling result. No less striking has been the self-assessment of the UK Interdepartmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment (1998) that broader approaches are needed to capture the concerns of the public in risk matters. How best to manage risks is a matter for societal debate and introspection and undoubtedly varies with economic and cultural settings, but it is clear that global environmental risks will rapidly eclipse human capacity to respond in a timely and effective way unless such risks are anticipated (to the extent possible), characterized for the benefit of those who must make decisions, compared with other risks competing for limited societal resources, and accorded priorities in the allocation of public and private efforts across the globe. Indeed, the newly established Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES 1999; IGES and Environmental Agency of Japan) in Japan has identified the need for a clearer picture of the future and for planning anticipatory counter-measures to risk among the major environmental messages of the twentieth century.

But what are the distinctive properties, if any, of these risks? What are the risk attributes that need to enter into characterization and priority-setting activities? Can indicators be found by which characterization can proceed? And what are the limits and areas of uncertainty and ignorance that risk analysts and decision makers need to observe if they are to avoid inflicting more harm and generating unintended effects rather than securing a safer and healthier planet? And, finally, with what other risks should we compare global environmental risks to learn from past experiences? The three chapters that follow take up these tasks and shed important light on directions for the improved risk analysis to which this volume aspires.

In chapter 2, Norberg-Bohm and her colleagues take on a most difficult challenge — can a framework be found, based upon sound and replicable methods, by which various environmental risks can be compared and ranked? It will need to be an approach applicable to developing countries, where the need for priority setting is greatest but where securing needed data is most problematic. It will also need to be robust in facilitating international comparisons despite the enormous differences among countries. Drawing upon a causal model of hazard and a taxonomy of technological hazards (Kates, Hohenemser, and Kasperson 1985), and adding the new element of “valued environmental component” to this past work, they recognize 18 descriptors of risk which they apply to 28 different environmental problems. The system for characterizing hazards developed from this exercise is designed to compare risks within and between countries, and has the virtue of doing this with high transparency (i.e. value judgements are apparent). Four country studies (treating India, Kenya, the Netherlands, and the United States) demonstrate the applicability of the risk-characterization system. Since this work is intended as a methodological contribution aimed at stimulating other efforts, we include in the appendices extensive detail on the methods used and guides for the analyst.

Smith takes a different approach in chapter 3 where he focuses on what he terms “risk transitions” in developing countries. The panoply of risks confronting a developing country at any point in time is an amalgam of risks arising in three transitions — a demographic transition, an epidemiological transition, and a risk transition. The demographic transition involves the shift from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates; the epidemiological transition entails a substantial reduction in traditional diseases and effects of natural hazards and a rise in modern diseases; and the risk transition, driven by the other two transitions, involves a decoupling of risk from ill-health and a growth of risk latency periods and uncertainties. The transition risks typically include the traditional risks that have long confronted such societies — poverty, natural disasters, infectious disease, and epidemics — but they also include the modern risks, such as degenerative diseases, risks with long latency periods, technologies with low-probability/high-consequence risks, and the risks associated with transboundary activities. Since these risks often overlap and interact in new synergistic combinations, they confront developing societies with perplexing new management challenges and new needed capabilities. Risk analysis in such contexts, Smith argues, needs to focus on net risk, in order to capture the arrays of changes contributing to risk lowering and risk raising. However, scales and risk distributions will also need close scrutiny, as risk transfer and risk redistribution are capable of producing unforeseen and nasty surprises. None the less, risk assessment aimed at characterizing risks during transitions and identifying net-risk-lowering strategies holds promise not only for more robust anticipatory analyses of risk but for charting comparative developmental pathways for developing countries.

Funtowicz and Ravetz take yet a different tack in chapter 4. Appreciating that global environmental risks often appear with non-linear or chaotic characteristics, scale interactions, and long time horizons over which they unfold and register consequences, they centre upon levels of systems uncertainty and intensity of decision stakes as defining attributes for affording insights into the special challenges of global environmental risks. Along with the editors of this volume, they seek a risk analysis geared to the distinctive problems posed by the nature of the risks. In particular, they argue that the customary use of traditional scientific methods is unlikely to capture the essential elements of these risks, primarily because such methods have limited capacity to provide answers or guidance for problems that are highly uncertain and politically contentious. These are key characteristics that decision makers in various countries have found very troublesome and which appear to be particularly prone to the social amplification of risk discussed in chapter 1. Their chapter explores, therefore, the use of what they term “post-normal science” to characterize and assess this special class of risk.

Within the context of this volume, several issues are particularly noteworthy concerning the Funtowicz and Ravetz discussion. First, it would be highly instructive to relate global environmental risks using the dimensions and aggregation schemes set forth by Norberg-Bohm and colleagues to the different types of risk assessment recognized by Funtowicz and Ravetz. It would appear that certain of Norberg-Bohm and colleagues' aggregations, such as “disruption” or “manageability,” might provide more powerful defining dimensions than systems uncertainty. Secondly, it is apparent that many of the difficult global environmental risks fall in the domain of high uncertainty and high decision stakes where conventional risk assessment, in the Funtowicz and Ravetz view, is most limited. So they argue for a kind of risk assessment — with broader participants, a new role for risk bearers, diverse peer review — entirely in keeping with the more democratic and humanistic risk analysis envisioned in chapter 1 for global environmental risk but also for assessing contentious and socially amplified risks more generally.

Taken together, these chapters provide important directions for the future development of approaches and methodologies for characterizing global environme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Note from the editors
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One CHARACTERIZING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS
• Part Two VULNERABILITY
• Part Three HIGH-RISK REGIONS
• Part Four GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL FUTURES
• References
• Contributors
• Index