All posts by Sani Yang

Global change, Disasters and Governance

I was unable to access this website in China all these days. This morning, I noticed that I can add new post, but still cannot read any existing post. Hopefully I can finish this post while it is still working.

Disasters seriously undermine longer term sustainability and the increasing environmental risk caused by global change has widely attracted attention.

What kind of scientific support can we provide to global change policymaking? Several aspects that we may think of:

  1. Can we further explain the mechanism of environmental risk under global change?  Do we understand global change and the evolution process of environmental risk as a global system? Is the “dose-response” theory for narrow-sense environmental risk still working? Do we need new for more general environmental risk?
  2. Can we propose integrated models to describe the environmental risk in the world? (Hey, models again! It is imperfect, it is subjective… but we need tools to ‘commercialize’ the value we have. People are easily and heavily influenced by charts and figures, isn’t it?) E.g. new models which can reflect the characteristics of  the cascading effect/domino effect/disaster chain effect?
  3. If we have new risk assessment models, can we design institutional design based adaptation strategies for integrated environmental risk governance?

(to be continued…)