Abstract
This symposium focuses on a constellation of issues concerning climate risks and responses to these risks. In the climate policy literature, this is often referred to as adaptation or climate change impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation. The last decades have seen not only substantial improvements in our ability to measure past climatic change and the anthropogenic forcing that caused it, but also to predict future changes. This has increased scientists’ ability to attribute current and future extreme weather events to climate change. In light of this ability, and the growing recognition that even optimistic mitigation scenarios will still result in substantial, hazardous changes to the environment, scientific and political attention has focused on climate risk reduction and adaptation alongside mitigation. The papers in this session, a first to focus on adaptation at PSA, will cover key issues including how best to attribute extreme events to climate change, how best to characterize uncertainty in the context of climate adaptation, what norms or constraints should guide judgments about good adaptation actions, and how adaptation progress could be measured at a global level.
