Climate Confident The Economics of Climate Risk: Gary Yohe on Abating, Adapting, and Surviving
In this week’s episode of the Climate Confident Podcast, I sit down with Dr. Gary Yohe, one of the world’s leading climate economists, long-time IPCC author, and a member of the Nobel Peace Prize, winning IPCC team of 2007. Gary has spent over four decades shaping how we understand climate change, not just as an environmental issue, but as a fundamental risk management challenge.
We explore his powerful framework: abate, adapt, or suffer. These are, he argues, the only three choices humanity has left, and crucially, some level of suffering is now unavoidable. Mitigation slows the pace of warming, adaptation reduces impacts, but neither can eliminate all risks. The insurance crisis unfolding in California and beyond shows what happens when climate risks become uninsurable, raising the threat of financial instability on a global scale.
Gary also reminds us that climate decisions must be iterative. Policies cannot be fixed for 100 years; they must evolve as science, technology, and risk tolerance change. He illustrates this with striking examples, from New York’s evacuation planning after Hurricane Sandy to San Francisco’s flexible approach to sea-level rise.
Yet, despite the scale of the challenge, Gary insists on hope, not blind optimism, but the conviction, as Václav Havel wrote, that action makes sense regardless of outcome. It’s this perspective that has kept him, and many others, working relentlessly on solutions for over 40 years.
If you want to understand why climate change is ultimately a risk management problem, why insurance, finance, and resilience are inseparable, and why hope is a strategy we can’t do without, this episode is essential listening.
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