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Symposium Schedule >
Roger Pielke, Jr.
Extreme Events and their Societal Impacts: Scientific Challenges and Policy Significance
It is obvious to observe that people depend upon the environment of planet Earth,
and many are increasingly aware that the environment itself depends upon
people. But some of these inter-dependencies are not so obvious. For instance,
the successful implementation of government programs to help citizens recover
from damaging floods depends, in some degree, upon an assumption of the
statistical stationarity of flood events over time. Similarly, the entire catastrophe
insurance and reinsurance sector, which underlies the mitigation of risk of
hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms and other extremes, depends upon the ability to
turn climate science into an actuarial science. Because environmental
perturbations evoke profound human responses (including suffering, pain, and
loss of wealth), there is considerable interest in understanding, and perhaps
even modulating, environmental responses to human perturbations. This lecture
uses lessons learned from a number of cases involving extreme events to discuss
some of the scientific and policy challenges involved with understanding the
two-way interconnections of humans and the broader environment that we depend
upon. |
