Track: B4. Navigating Climate Risks: Modeling and Risk Assessment

Background/Objectives

How we see and assess climate risk is an implicit definition of adaptation and resilience. CRIDA is an open-source climate risk methodology that assumes that drivers, threats, and opportunities are most effectively constrained through identifying and engaging stakeholders early in project development; building confidence in analysis by exploring a system of interest’s inherent, bottom-up, and emergent risks; then reducing those risks by first developing robust, decisive measures for high confidence climate impacts before moving on to design flexible options to address less-certain impacts and interactions. The combination of robustness and flexibility as an operational approach to adaptation and resilience has proven to be powerful for a wide range of infrastructure, ecological, and governance contexts in both emerging and most-developed economies. 

CRIDA was crowd-sourced globally through hundreds of experts; its development was sponsored by groups such as UNESCO, the World Bank, US AID, the US Millennium Challenge Corporation, the US Army Corps of Engineers, Deltares, AGWA, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 2018, CRIDA has been field tested in more than 30 countries, ranging from utility planning in the Philippines to statewide nature-based water storage programs in California. The Green Climate Fund and World Bank have recognized CRIDA in their category of most-recommended approaches to assess and reduce climate risk.

While CRIDA implementation can be quite sophisticated and quantitative, the methodology was also developed to explicitly address conditions of so-called deep uncertainty, especially when past data and/or analytical capacity may be limited, as well as for institutions who wish to build expertise incrementally by adopting CRIDA in discrete stages.

UNESCO is the publisher of the CRIDA methodology, committed to rolling this out to all national parties by 2030, and the host of the CRIDA distance learning platform, which has trained more than 4000 professionals globally. UNESCO is also now hosting development of a procedural and analytical CRIDA update.
 

Approach/Activities

This talk will explore tangible lessons that have emerged from CRIDA cases globally about the emerging practice of risk assessment, the use of bottom-up versus top-down risk assessment methodologies, how to measure resilience and adaptation progress, the handling of uncertainties in metered and projected climate data, the development of gray versus green solutions, and how best to engage diverse stakeholders in technical infrastructure project development. 

Results/Lessons Learned

As CRIDA moves to the development of a 2.0 process, several themes have already become clear:

• Deep uncertainty is a significant issue for many projects, especially large-scale and long-lived investments
• Robustness is a more familiar and traditional approach to design and planning, while flexible and incremental solutions are more institutionally challenging
• Bottom-up analytical approaches encourage an approach with decision makers and stakeholders to consider risk tolerance in contrast to some abstract vision of absolute risk
• Identifying performance limits and resilience indicators with stakeholders accelerates buy-in and implementation
• Many institutions choose to adopt CRIDA in stages, adding complexity over progressive projects
• Systems-level analysis and implementation supports the development of green and hybrid solutions