ABSTRACT
Climate risk management is a persistent and challenging problem for policymakers around the world. Despite ongoing attempts by the scientic community to characterise climate-related problems in politically incisive ways, they continue to be exceedingly tricky to understand, dene or to resolve in ways that are satisfactory to all (or even most) policymakers. Climate change, in particular, is a sustainable development issue that is so inter-related with almost every aspect of society, economy and ecology that policies need much more than simply scientic answers (Hulme, 2009). The rhetoric of both politicians and experts in recent years seems to reect these diculties. It has been described variously as ‘the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen’ (Stern, 2006), ‘more serious even than the threat of terrorism’ (King, 2004) and ‘one of the greatest moral challenges of our age’ (Rudd, 2009). Alternatively, it is ‘absolute crap’ (Abbott, 2009, cited in Rintoul, 2009), ‘a Frankenstein monster that threatens to devour its own designers’ (Peiser, 2009) and an ‘expensive hoax’ (Trump, 2014).
