Course overview
Climate risk is emerging as a key risk driver for systems as diverse as critical infrastructure (water, energy, transport, communications) and the built environment (buildings and cities), agri-food and fibre production systems, human health, finance and insurance, and the natural environment. These climate risks include physical risks (arising from the physical manifestation of climate change), transition risks (because of transition to a carbon-neutral economy) and systemic risks (because of interconnections between sectors and systems). This course will highlight the roles, responsibilities, and ethical considerations for engineers and other risk professionals in the identification, evaluation and management of climate risk, and provide students with a suite of theories, methods and tools to support risk assessments. A particular focus will be placed on evaluating risks in complex systems that are beyond the scope or control of individual actors (e.g. organisations). Finally, this course will provide overview of emerging concepts of system resilience, and students will learn about methods both to support adaptive planning and to enhance system resilience.
Course learning outcomes
- Articulate the theoretical and methodological foundations and ethical responsibilities of practitioners in the field of risk analysis
- Demonstrate competency in a range of qualitative and quantitative methods for risk analysis, and describe their underlying assumptions and application contexts
- Apply systems thinking principles to the field of risk analysis, including problem framing, boundary critique, method selection and approaches to systemic complexity
- Generate context-relevant climate and energy futures (projections and scenarios), and describe assumptions of alternative 'lines of evidence'
- Conduct a causal analysis of a historical climate-related 'failure', and describe the utility and limitations of this analysis to inform risk assessments
- Describe the difference between adaptive planning and enhancing system resilience, and identify methods managing both foreseen and unforeseen risks
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