External Seminar: Andy Challinor (University of Leeds)

[Leverhulme MASS Seminar]

Andy Challinor (University of Leeds)

Climate risks across sectors and borders

Our changing climates present numerous challenges to sustainability across a range of spatial and temporal scales. Traditional assessment methods either capture a broad-scale understanding of impacts, adaptation and risk (e.g. IPCC) or they focus on risks that are specific to countries and sectors (e.g. UK CCRA). Systemic climate risks, which result from the potential for cascading impacts through inter-related social and political systems, pose particular challenges to risk assessment. This talk focuses primarily on challenges to food systems in order to illustrate the need for, and the characteristics of, new approaches that can account for transmission of climatic risk across borders and sectors. A new typology of risk transmission is used to highlight two underpinning challenges: detection and attribution of climatic risk across systems and scales, and assessments of the extent to which adaptation is keeping pace with climate change. Crop response to temperature is used to illustrate these challenges.