Climate Change: A Risk Assessment

14 July 2015 – Launch of a new report, commissioned by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth office, into the role of governments in the fight against climate change.

The report, Climate Change: A Risk Assessment, was edited and produced by the University of Cambridge's Centre for Science and Policy.

Read their views and summary of the report.

Read the policy brief. 

Read the full report.

The report's key authors

• Sir David King, the UK Foreign Secretary's Special Representative for Climate Change
• Professor Daniel Schrag, a member of the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
• Professor Zhou Dadi, a member of the China National Expert Committee on Climate Change
• Professor Qi Ye, Director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Centre for Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University, China
• Dr Arunabha Ghosh, CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, India

Launch event, London Stock Exchange, 14 July 2015

Read the meeting notes and ClimateWise summary.

Some of the key themes of the event included:

• The need for governments to “plan or the worst case scenario” as they already do for other types of security threat
• Researching and reacting to the interconnected scientific, social and economic factors as well as the time-sensitive nature of climate change
• The corresponding social, geo-political and other systemic risks posed by the environmental changes if carbon emissions reduction is unsuccessful
• The technological and economic advancements potential of the transition to low CO2 emissions
• How to react, proportionate to the risks and how to reduce the risks
• The overwhelming prevalence of human heat stress, floods and crop failures that could occur given that the likelihood of keeping global temperature rises below the crucial 4°C is just 1 per cent.