Planning for the Climate Endgame

This morning I read this article on the new multi-author paper, Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios , with considerable interest.

As someone who has followed the advancement of climate change science and the travails of the climate change debate in some detail since starting my first Geography degree in 2001 (at the ripe old age of 37), I can’t help appreciating this call to consider ‘Worst Cases’, in order to help us contextualise our current predicament with respect to this particularly significant low probability, but catastrophically high consequence risk.

But is talk of an extinction-level event not just climate Doomerism? Will the consideration of these ‘Worst Case’ risks not just have people throwing their hands up in despair?

Well, maybe some. However, the consideration of worst-case risks has a fundamental role to play in risk management.

As another Tweeter remarked this morning “There’s a world of difference between ‘we’re all doomed’ and ‘we’re pushing natural systems into unknown territory in a way that significantly increases the risk of catastrophe’ ”.

Since the publication in the US of the Charney Report in 1979, with its nuanced and contingent projections for climate change based on then contemporary understandings of the role and effects of atmospheric CO2, climate science has driven huge advances in our understanding of climate risks. Since 1992, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published its iterative series of 6 reports: the first of which included a cartoon-like diagram to portray our then-best understanding of epochal temperature variability, whilst the most recent clearly indicates that we are now monitoring and measuring climate variables and developing projection models for future change to incredible levels of complexity.

But science is by its nature conservative. Peer review is renown for its function in challenging and softening discussion of ‘long-tail’, low probability outcomes. Likewise, emergency planning tends to build scenarios around ‘plausible worst case’, rather than ‘worst case’ thinking. This softer approach tends to patronise emergency managers who build planning scenarios and exercises around ‘implausible’ too-unlikely hazards and effects. This is fine, until reality reminds us that our hopes and ideas for what represents ‘the worst’ can be na?ve in the extreme.

Since its first publication in 2008 the UK National Risk Register has portrayed the risks of Pandemic Flu as the principal ‘High-Right’ risk, meaning it was understood to bear the highest probability and impact of all the assessed risks. In the same document Emerging Infectious Disease was seen as lower probability, and:

“…if an outbreak of an emerging infectious disease occurred in the UK, and preventative measures were not put in place swiftly, the impact seen could be on the scale of the SARS outbreak in Toronto, Canada. Toronto had 251 cases of SARS in two waves over a period of several months. For every patient with confirmed SARS, 10 potential cases were investigated and 100 followed up.” ?????????

Even with the publication of the latest National Risk Register in December 2020, the risk of High-consequence infectious disease outbreaks was 'only' classified as a Level C risk, threatening “circa 41 to 200” fatalities in the UK: I’ll repeat that, the plausible worst case scenario was defined as circa 41 to 200 fatalities! This document however, added a caveat to its own assessment that the then prevalent COVID-19 pandemic was “not included in the matrix”. Yes, COVID-19, which according to the ONS led to not 200, but to an estimated 200,335 deaths between March 2020 and June 2022, was portrayed as an event—a data point for future risk assessment—rather than as an actual occurrence of a hazard that was, even as the Register was being published, viscerally illustrating the folly of being too conservative in scenario development. ?

If this does not convince you of the importance of including worst-case scenarios in our planning for high consequence risks, then I really don’t know what will?

I propose that without acknowledging the potential for catastrophe—an act which enables the deliberation and development of the measures needed for its avoidance—we risk sleepwalking into it.