Mitigating and Exacerbating Climate Shocks to the Nexus PDF Free Download
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Abstract This chapter explores how responses to nexus shocks can
help reduce impacts or make them worst. It draws on ndings from ve
co-production workshops with the UK Met Ofce, Atkins, Chatham
House, Lloyds of London and Willis Re, Cambridge Cleantech and LDA
Design, to assess the factors that exacerbate and mitigate climate shocks
to the food, energy, water, environment nexus and subsequent impacts.
These are especially important to consider, as they enable opportunities
for lessons learnt and better and more resilient responses to nexus shocks
in future. However, these are often inadequately explored, and more is
needed to ensure decision-making remains relevant and aligned with the
needs of stakeholders affected by nexus shocks, when dealing with the
complex nature of these shocks.
Keywords Decision-making · Climate shock · Mitigating
Exacerbating · Communication · Resilience
HigHligHts
• Responses to climate shocks can make initial impacts across the
energy, food, water, environment sectors worst if inadequately man-
aged, however, these factors can also help mitigate future shocks.
CHAPTER 2
Mitigating and Exacerbating Climate Shocks
to the Nexus
© The Author(s) 2019
C. Howarth, Resilience to Climate Change,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94691-7_2
24 C. HOWARtH
• Exacerbators of shocks, when properly understood, identied and
implications examined, may not be fully or permanently removed,
and can become obstacles that exist within the system.
• Impacts of climate shocks to the food, energy, water, environment
nexus demonstrate clear similarities in terms of the prediction of
shocks, interactions with infrastructure, local shock experiences, the
role of nance and insurance, and governments and governance,
when explored through an exacerbation/mitigation lens.
Nexus shocks are growing in prominence on the global stage. All ve
environmental risks within the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2018
Global Risk Perception Survey ranked higher than average for both like-
lihood of occurring and impact of the risk. This reects the year 2017
which was characterized by increases in CO2 prominent hurricanes,
and extreme temperature records resulting in resources across the food,
energy, water, environment nexus being under increasing strain and
growing in vulnerability. Extreme weather events are classied by the
WEF as the top risk in terms of likelihood and the second highest risk in
terms of impact, whereas failure of climate change mitigation and adapta-
tion features as the fth highest likely risk and the fourth most impactful
risk (WEF 2018). Yet, many of the top risks that featured in the Global
Risk Report are connected in some way to climate change and weather
extremes: large-scale involuntary migration, man-made environmental
disasters feature as the sixth and seventh most likely risks respectively,
and water crises, food crises, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse,
large-scale involuntary migration and spread of infectious diseases are
listed as the fth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth risks, respectively,
in terms of impact. This demonstrates an increased recognition of the
prominence of these shocks with warnings against complacency as shocks
can arise unexpectedly with profound impacts; ‘in a world of complex and
interconnected systems, feedback loops, threshold effects and cascading dis-
ruptions can lead to sudden and dramatic breakdowns’ (WEF 2018: 7).
Assessing the impacts from climate shocks to assets within the food,
energy, water, environment nexus depends on the sensitivity (i.e. the
extent to which an asset can survive the stress imposed upon it by the
shock) and resilience (i.e. ‘the ability of a system, entity, community or
person to adapt to a variety of changing conditions and to withstand
shocks while still maintaining its essential functions’, World Bank 2015)
of these assets (De la Fuente 2007). With a growing global population,
