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AI Summary:

Risk Science is a framework for understanding and managing global catastrophic risks (GCRs) and slow-developing catastrophic risks (SDCRs). Key points include:

• SDCRs are systemic, long-term, and often international in nature, making them challenging to address
• A six-step process for policy development includes scenario planning, risk identification, assessment, evaluation, management options, and governance approaches
• Integrated assessment of GCRs examines multiple risks together to address overarching questions
• Climate change, ecological collapse, and weapons of mass destruction are interconnected major global risks
• The Boundary Risk for Humanity and Nature (BRIHN) framework integrates planetary boundaries and GCR concepts
• Systemic instability from global interdependence increases the potential for cascading failures
• Focus on hazards with global escalation potential, like pandemics, nuclear conflict, and climate change </aside>

Source: “Slowly developing catastrophic risks [SDCRs] present particular challenges because of their systemic nature, long-term horizons and uncertainties, because they are, in political terms, ‘manufactured risks’ (i.e. they are someone’s fault and/or they should be predictable), and because in many cases their international or even global nature make ownership and treatment entirely unclear…

…we propose the following framework for policy development… This proposal elaborates from the IRGC risk governance framework (IRGC, 2005, 2008) focusing on the specific challenges posed by slow-developing catastrophic risks.

Step 1 – Scenario development and horizon scanning, to identify the ‘alternative worlds’ through analysis of the key drivers for change in the main areas (resources, environment, populations, geo-politics etc.) where change is most likely to be played out in the foreseeable future. And to provide the basis for incentivising evidence-based policy through identification of strategic opportunities as well as risks.

Step 2 – Identification and characterisation of SDCRs

• What type of risk are we looking at? Does it fall into a particular class (different types of risk may require different types of approach)?

• What are the key components of the risk? Its representation, its interaction with other risks and factors?

• What timescale are we looking at? Who is going to suffer (or benefit) from the changed circumstances if a critical transition does occur?

• Identification of the ‘system.’ Where are its boundaries? Which phenomena are internal and which are external?

Step 3 – Assessment of current status and possible evolution

• How will the risk evolve? Deterministic and probabilistic modelling.

• What are its direct and indirect consequences and its inter-relationships with other risks and factors?

• Holistic assessment in social and historical contexts.

• Combined use of the thresholds approach, scenario planning and resilience thinking to assess the potential effects of reaching a tipping point on different sectors and on society as a whole.

• Identification of the ‘warnings and indicators’ of critical transitions.

Step 4 – Evaluation and judgment

• Identification of trade-offs with other risks/problems at all stages.

• Making political and business decisions as to whether to engage (or not) in preventative and palliative measures, and if so at what stage (cf. warnings and indicators).

Step 5 – Development of risk management options

• Using science as a basis for regulation.