Assessing Climate Change Risk and Resilience in the Yukon
improved and strengthened as they are
integrated in planning and decision-making.
ISO 14091, which discusses risk assessments
in the context of climate change, recognizes
that climate change risks differ from other risks,
given the difficulty of predicting their proba-
bilities. This means that climate change risk
assessments might need to incorporate
approaches that build on conventional
methods. Assessments that primarily rely
on statistical probabilities can be ineffective
when looking at climate change impacts. This
is especially true in the Yukon, where there
are significant data and information gaps for
climate projections, as well as capacity limita-
tions across governments and communities to
interpret and use the probabilities of climate
risks in decision-making.
The approach taken in this Yukon assessment
a holistic look at societal resilience, values
and challenges as they intersect with a rapidly
changing climate - emphasizes the
qualitative expertise and knowledge of
Yukoners. Although risk analyses often focus
on quantifiable information, such as economic
losses or damage, the Yukon assessment
created a resilience framework to understand
and represent a diverse set of values and
potential consequences to those values as a
result of climate change impacts. Most of those
consequences are not readily quantifiable.
However, similar to conventional risk assess-
ment, a detailed and reproducible framework
for ranking likelihood and consequence was
established, and participants' expertise and
input supported a scoring of risks. While the
analysis does not provide quantitative or
statistical modeling of risk, the framework
nevertheless captures the primary elements of
risk management: documentation and
communication with its key audiences,
systematic identification of risk scenarios,
and risk analysis. Furthermore, the focus on
resilience and areas of action strengthens the
link to and supports integration with risk
treatment (or adaptation planning and
decision-making), and the framework is
tailored to the Yukon context.
Future iterations of the risk assessment can
expand and refine the list of risks identified,
and continue to increase the depth of risk
analysis. Qualitative and semi-qualitative risk
assessments - similar to those undertaken in
the Yukon that rely on the expertise and deep
local knowledge of Yukoners - would benefit
from additional opportunities to "workshop"
and share knowledge, which were necessarily
limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Further refinements, including but not limited
to increasing regional and community-level
scale of analysis, expanding the list of risks
identified and analyzed, and incorporating
climate and systems modeling, may also be
possible.
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