Law, Policy and Climate Change: The Regulation of Systemic Risks

Focusing on systemic risks caused by climate change, this book examines how these risks can be effectively regulated to ensure resilience and avoid catastrophe.

Systemic risks are risks that threaten the systems upon which society depends, including ecosystems, social systems, financial systems, and systems of infrastructure. Such risks are typically characterised by inherent complexity, profound uncertainty, and overwhelming ambiguity. In combination, these features pose significant regulatory challenges for policy and law-makers. Examining how different types of systemic risks caused by climate change are being regulated in four different jurisdictions – the EU, the UK, the US and Australia – this book identifies deficiencies associated with regulating systemic risks using a traditional approach, based on a linear relationship between risk and regulation, which is widely used to regulate risk. The book advances a regulatory approach that is, instead, founded on the concept of "risk governance". This involves a structured yet flexible, holistic, interdisciplinary, and inclusive basis for responding to systemic risks; and it is, this book argues, a more effective basis for regulating systemic risks given their uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This book will appeal to academics, policy law-makers, and practitioners working at the intersection of law and policy in the areas of regulation, risk management and climate change.