126 / 140
124 SISSEL HAUGDAL JORE
Our perceptions of risks and crises influence our willingness
to act upon the risks
Although the municipalities have been given special responsibility for ensuring that
their communities are safe and resilient against all kind of threats, including climate
change, some risks are easier for a municipality to deal with than others.
Among various types of risk identified by Renn (2008) are
simple risks
, in
which the cause is well known, the potential negative consequences are obvious, the
uncertainty is low, and there is hardly any ambiguity with regard to the interpretation
of the risk. Simple risks are recurrent and unaffected by ongoing or expected major
changes. Consequently, statistics are available and the application of statistics to
assess the risks is meaningful.
Renn draws attention to the fact that not all risks are simple: they cannot all
be calculated as a function of probability and effect. Such risks are called
systemic
risks
. The term systemic describes the extent to which a risk is embedded in the
larger contexts of societal processes. The management of systemic risks, such as
climate change, requires a more holistic approach to hazard identification, risk
assessment, and risk management because investigating systemic risks goes beyond
the usual agent-consequence analysis. Systemic risks are not confined to national
borders or a single sector and do not fit the linear, mono-causal model of risk. They
are complex (multi-causal) and surrounded by uncertainty and/or ambiguity (van
Asselt and Renn, 2011).
According to Renn’s classification of risks, climate change is an example of
systemic risk. The causes of climate change and how climate change will evolve in
the future are disputed. Although multiple statistical data are available relating to the
conservation of climate, it is not necessarily meaningful to use these data to describe
future climate. Consequently, the issue of climate change is a risk characterised by
uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. For such risk, there is a need for a much
broader perspective than just normative decision making based on traditional risk
and vulnerability analysis. This implies that decision making and institutional
challenges are posed not only by the complex behaviour of socioecological systems,
but also by how citizens, politicians, mass media, and non-state participants frame
and respond to rapidly unfolding cascading ecological crises (Hajer, 1995;
Rosenthal, Boin and Comfort, 2001). This type of risk is much more open to political
negotiation concerning mitigation and response.
In parallel with efforts to describe different typologies of risk, considerable
scholarship has been devoted to identifying and categorising different types of crisis.
The literature has tried to explain why some crises gain more attention and resources
than others. Rosenthal
et al.
(2001) proposed a typology of four patterns of crisis,
depending on their speed of escalation and termination. A specific attribute of a
slow-burning crisis such as climate change is that it develops gradually, which makes
it difficult to identify when it begins and when it ends. Most estimates and
predictions of future climate change anticipate climate in a 100-year perspective.
However, in order to implement sufficient climate change adaptation measures,