مدیریت ریسک اقلیمی و بخش برق Climate risk management and the electricity sector

1. Introduction The electric utility industry is a key player climate change arena. Globally, the sector emits 35% of total global emissions in 2010 (IPCC, 2014a). The industry also faces considerable vulnerability to climate change impacts due to capital-intensive infrastructure investments associated with resource extraction, power generation, and distribution and transmission, as well as market pressures linked to demographic transitions and a changing climate (U.S. DOE, 2015). The annual cost of electricity production is projected to increase by 14% or $51 billion by 2050 due to warming temperatures (Jaglom et al., 2014). Damage to energy infrastructure can have a considerable impact on social systems, economies, and ecological systems, as illustrated by recent high-profile hurricanes and forest fires in the U.S. (Reed et al., 2010; CHOLETA, 2015). Examples like these indicate the type of natural hazards that are likely to become more frequent, intense, or prolonged as a result of climate change (IPCC, 2014b). Climate risk management can be seen as a process that incorporates “knowledge and information about climate-related events, trends, forecasts and projections into decision making to increase or maintain benefits and reduce potential harm or losses” (Travis and Bates, 2014, pg. 1). It can serve as an effective framework for assessing adaptation by underscoring the likelihood and implications of potential climate change impacts that adaptation actions are seeking to address (Jones and Preston, 2011). Climate risk management in the form of risk and decision analysis is valuable for expanding the range of potential adaptation options. As a multidisciplinary process necessitating an integrated consideration of socioeconomic and environmental issues process, climate risk management is increasingly preferred over the traditional hazard reduction policies that pursue a narrow roster of options while ignoring the much larger range of theoretically feasible ones (Travis and Bates, 2014). Adopting a ‘risk focus’ implies that organizations and cross-sectoral collaborations identify specific climate change-related threats and impacts as a starting point for developing adaptation measures. Such adaptation involves action from a broad range of people at different levels in multiple organizations, especially people who have not explicitly considered climate in past decision-making (Willows and Connell, 2003).