ABSTRACT
It is a fact of life that action to reduce one risk can lead to the unintended or unforeseen creation of another. When governments try to make things better, the consequences of their actions can conspire to make things worse; this is the law of unintended consequences. The complex technologies associated with new uses of land offer potentially huge benefits for the amelioration of the risks posed by climate change and energy insecurity. They also carry with them, however, their own significant social, environmental, economic, legal and human challenges. As a result, the interventions made by governments to harness these technical ‘solutions’ often create new sets of countervailing risks. By incentivizing the production of bioenergy crops for example, governments may reduce CO2 emissions from transportation and diversify energy supplies. But such measures may shift risks elsewhere, for example increasing global food insecurity and deforestation. The extensive reach of government across many sectors and the fact that risks are experienced globally makes the central challenge faced by decision-makers double: they must choose the most appropriate policy instruments to manage the primary risks in question and also anticipate the secondary risks that may arise as the result of these choices.
