Climate change as the policymaker’s puzzle

CLIMATE change represents the ultimate policymaker’s bane – a “super wicked problem” with consequential tendrils stretching threateningly towards just about every facet of human civilisation.

For a crisis whose acuteness is existential in scope, and which generates extreme divergences between parties and priorities, how do policymakers begin to accurately assess the risk dynamics and weigh resilience strategies? 

Such is the thankless task that Dr Vinod Thomas, a visiting senior fellow at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute with decades of experience at institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, sets out for himself in Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change.