Stage 5.2 Discuss climate change risks associated with adaptation options
Who's Involved
- Assignment Management Team and some of workshop participants
Timing and time required
- During meetings after the ‘Climate risk management and cost benefit analysis’ workshop
- 1 day
Key questions
- What are the direct climate-related risks to each option?
- For example, risk of a change in average temperature impacting the efficiency of a power plant.
- What are the indirect climate-related risks associated with each option?
- For example, risk of higher temperature leading to more irrigation and less water available for hydropower generation?
- Are there critical thresholds associated with climate change which could impact the options?
- Are risks likely to occur progressively or after a particular point in time?
Tools
- Sections for report describing assessment of climate change risks to energy sector performance (supply and demand)
- Completed risk register and risk table
Guidance
- The adaptation options may themselves be vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and so it is important that these considerations are incorporated into the CBA.
- For instance, if the adaptation options are a range of new energy generation assets to fill an energy demand supply-demand gap, then these new assets may also be affected by climate change
- Face-to-face meetings following the workshop should be held to try and obtain as much data as possible about how climate change could affect the adaptation options, where relevant.
- This should include assessing both direct and indirect risks. It is important that there is a broad consideration of indirect risks as these may be more significant to some adaptation options than direct risks (e.g., if water has to be diverted for higher priority uses, then this could result in inadequate water supplies to a power plant and temporary shutdown during dry periods).
- A list of agreed assumptions about climate risks and engineering / scientific references should be documented.
Outputs
- A summary of how the performance of each adaptation option will change over the period of assessment as a result of climate change.