Stage 3.4 Analyze & evaluate priority risks
Who's Involved
- Assignment Management Team
Timing and time required
- Between ‘Climate risks & vulnerabilities’ workshop and ‘Climate risk management and cost-benefit analysis’ workshop
- 2-4 weeks
Key questions
- What are the key climate-related risks and opportunities for the energy sector (supply and demand)?
- Will critical energy sector thresholds (which represent the boundary between tolerable and intolerable levels of risk) be crossed due to climate change?
- What are the main uncertainties in the risk assessment?
Tools
- "Climate risks & vulnerabilities’ workshop report
- Reports and data provided by in-country experts
- Wider literature on climate change and its impacts of relevance to the energy sector.
Guidance
- The aim at this stage is to undertake high-level assessments to enable prioritization of climate-related risks to the performance of the energy sector. The assessments should cover all of the country’s important energy assets, along with risks / opportunities related to energy demand, and should consider risks associated with changes in average and extreme climatic conditions, drawing on a wide range of the latest climate change model outputs.
- An essential element of the risk analysis is to begin to understand the potential impacts on future energy security. First, this involves obtaining or developing baseline scenarios for energy supply and demand covering the timescales of the assessment (as agreed at Stage 1.1), ignoring the effects of climate change. Then, the impacts of climate change on energy supply and demand should be analyzed. This may reveal a future energy demand-supply gap due to climate change.
- As well as utilizing the information from Stages 3.1 to 3.3, the assessments should also draw upon observed data and research undertaken in-country, such as that linking water flows to hydropower output, or energy demand as a function of climatic factors. Where this information is not available or is not of sufficient depth or quality, it should be supplemented with information from the wider international literature.
- Because this is intended to be a high-level analysis, it should not involve undertaking detailed new quantitative modeling, but rather should draw upon pre-existing information or should develop simple correlations between climate and energy sector performance, where appropriate. Using the future climate change scenarios, it should then be possible to generate high-level estimates of climate change impacts.
- Risk is a function of the probability of a hazard and the magnitude of its consequences. Risks should be rated on the empty risk prioritization table produced at Stage 3.3 and should be recorded on a risk register.
- Reliable information on future changes in low probability climatic events (i.e. extreme events) is usually not available, so it may not be possible to rate the significance of future risks associated with extreme events. This should be acknowledged as an area of uncertainty in the risk assessment.
Outputs
- Sections for report describing the high-level assessment of climate change risks to energy sector performance (supply and demand), quantified where possible.
- Completed risk table and risk register.
Albania