Understanding Climate Risk

When civilisation is at stake, policies must prioritise extreme risks and plausible catastrophic outcomes over comfortable assumptions about likely or middle-of-the-road futures. Betting against worst-case climate scenarios is a dangerous gamble.

This report argues that relying on moderate or “most likely” climate scenarios is a dangerous gamble. It criticises current climate policies—such as carbon budgets—that accept relatively low success rates (50–66%), comparing them unfavourably to safety standards in engineering, where failure probabilities are extremely small. The report contends that policymakers and scientific institutions like the IPCC place too much emphasis on middle-of-the-road probability estimates rather than plausible worst-case outcomes. Because climate change poses existential risks, conventional cost–benefit and probability-based risk analysis may be inadequate. Instead, the report calls for a stronger focus on high-end, worst-case scenarios, where the potential damage is greatest and the consequences could threaten civilisation itself.