Complex Environmental Challenges: Need for Integrated Risk Council
Earth’s environment has probably been changing for years due to many reasons: some reasons that are known and understood by scientific community and some reasons that are not known, and which scientific community is still trying to understand. Some environmental changes that are internal changes and some that are external changes. The question is whether all these known-unknowns as well as internal-external changes happening in earth’s environment should be considered normal, common, as well as cyclical. Nations need to evaluate these factors in a collective non- partisan way. It is important that nations understand earth:its environment, as well as its dependencies. To understand earth: its systems, its environment, its dependencies, as well as the underlying science in a non partisan neutral manner has become very important for every nation today.
Over the last few years, nations have witnessed increasingly heated debate on the role of humans in alleged deterioration of earth’s environment. Although the role of humans has been questioned by many, the question is whether scientific community can say with certainty that these environmental changes are not due to natural or other unknown reasons and that their scientific conclusions are not tainted by their political ideology. In addition, this makes it absolutely essential that nations do critical risk centric assessment of the science findings that has such broad and significant impact across nations.
Environmental changes have occurred in the past, are occurring now, and probably will occur in the future due to various known and unknown factors. Some unknowns that nations and its scientists will be able to understand; and many more unknowns that nations and its scientists will probably never be able to understand.
At this point, nations probably can neither agree nor disagree with the so called global warming hypothesis or climate change theories decisively. Nor can nations agree or disagree on the proposed climate change solutions that are being proposed today, as the scientific information in totality is probably not sufficient for any nation to come to an informed conclusion. What is probably clear at this point is that the complex environmental challenges makes it essential for nations to have a fundamental integrated risk governance framework that can not only identify critical environmental risks, but can also effectively assess, prioritize, and manage environmental risks in a collective non partisan way.
This should be the first step nation’s needs to take to bring the necessary confidence in the environmental problem as well as the proposed solutions
Let me know your thoughts
Jayshree Pandya PhD
Global Risk Advisor
