







































Ecology, Economy, and Society–the INSEE Journal 7(1): 161-164, January 2024 

BOOK REVIEW 

Building Resilience for an Uncertain Climate Future 

Preety M Bhandari* 
 
Thomas, Vinod. 2023. Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change. Springer 
Nature Singapore. 
 

Climate change is the pre-
eminent challenge of this 
century, and its 
intersection with 
economy, society, and 
nature is amplifying the 
baseline risks that are 
commonly factored into 
decision-making. The 
Sixth Assessment of the 
Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change (IPCC 
2022) clearly states that 
around 3.3 billion to 3.6 
billion people live in 
countries that are highly 
vulnerable to the impacts 
of climate change, with 
hotspots in the Arctic, 
Central and South 
America, Small Island 
Developing States (SIDS), 
South Asia, and much of 
Sub-Saharan Africa.  

 
* World Resources Institute. preety.bhandari@wri.org  

Copyright © Bhandari 2024. Released under Creative Commons Attribution © 

NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 

Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581–6152 (print); 2581–6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v7i1.1174  

mailto:preety.bhandari@wri.org
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v7i1.1174


 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [162] 

This book is about securing the future of these vulnerable populations and 
ensuring their right to development gains, and in the broader scheme, 
ensuring equity and that no one is left behind. It urges the audience, in 
particular, policy- and decision-makers—through an excellent exposition on 
the need to enhance the understanding of risks in a multi-crisis world—to 
see the need to develop long-term resilience. 

Thomas draws on his rich experience to build the framework for this 
construct. He uses examples, including from the recent global experience 
with managing COVID-19, and the Montreal Protocol and its success in 
limiting ozone-depleting substances, to highlight opportunities for proactive 
decision-making to manage risks in the face of uncertainty. 

1. THE SEVEN MANTRAS TO DEAL WITH THE WICKED 
PROBLEM 

The first part of the book delves into normative frameworks on risk and 
resilience, deftly providing an exposé on the differences between risk and 
uncertainty, short-term adaptation versus long-term resilience, disaster risk 
reduction vis-a-vis disaster risk management, response to recovery and 
building back better, and finally concluding with how resilience also shapes 
risk and ultimately defines the capacity to confront and manage it. 

With this exposé, the second part of the book focuses on the climate 
catastrophe, characterizing climate change as a “super wicked problem”. 
Lazarus (2009) has posited it as a problem that “defies resolution because 
of the enormous interdependencies, uncertainties, circularities, and 
conflicting stakeholders implicated by any effort to develop a solution”, 
building on the original exposition on wicked problems.  

However, Thomas has very sanguinely provided a way forward to confront 
this problem, with a eight-part solution for effective global economic 
policy-making with a clear interface between economic policy-making and 
climate and disaster management to manage climate and disasters:  

1. stress testing for resilience capabilities in the context of rising and 
compounding risks; 

2. moving from coping to being prepared to prevent disasters;  

3. prompting growth economists to pay attention to risk and 
resilience and de-emphasize growth in this context;  

4. connecting and communicating the linkages between disasters and 
the urgent need to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions;  



[163] Bhandari 

5. ensuring people’s well-being, moving away from static coverage of 
an event to an elaboration of the causality for a wider and better public 
understanding of the root cause, enabling an action agenda; 

6. placing a premium on innovation and risk-taking to mobilize the 
transition to a low carbon economy, with a special role for the private 
sector to unleash such a transition 

7. ensuring that short-term solutions do not undermine the need for 
urgent action on climate;  

8. inserting circuit breakers such that the proclivity towards climate-
negative responses do not take hold in the wake of a catastrophe.  

At first glance, these may appear to be straightforward home truths, but 
their collective implementation is critical to avoid what would ultimately be 
the catastrophic impacts of climate change on people, societies, economies, 
and ecosystems. 

2. BREAKING THE CIRCUIT TO LAUNCH A VIRTUOUS 
CYCLE OF ACTION 

It is with remarkable simplicity that the author has broken down the 
complicated concepts of risk and resilience. One such illustration, drawn 
from the literature, is a comparison of an oak tree with a reed—the latter is 
adaptive to terrible storms and able to withstand them without breaking, 
while an oak can also survive a storm but may eventually break—
underscoring the importance of the capacity to adjust and adapt for 
resilience. Some of the hard-hitting climate causalities that have been 
explained in easy-to-understand terms are the heating of the cities in the 
Indian peninsula in 2021 due to glacial melting and the extreme cold in 
Texas in 2022 because of a gap in the Arctic winds caused by the warming 
of the Arctic peninsula. The causalities are explored not only in terms of 
multiple types of impacts but also across sectors, such as the increase in the 
incidence of pathogenic diseases linked to the destruction of nature caused 
by warming. Such nuggets are found across different chapters, making for 
an interesting and accessible read. 

More importantly, the book brings home the crying need for correcting the 
course of development and economics, defying the logic and preoccupation 
with growth as embodied in GDPs and shifting to the integration of 
negative externalities, risks, and spillovers in measures of growth. The false 
dichotomy between growth and environmental action, the choice of 
discount rates in making policy choices, and such traditional analytical 
frameworks and tools are also clearly debunked by the author.  



 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [164] 

Ultimately, system transformation and transformative change calls for a 
paradigm shift in how traditional economics and tools need to change to 
incorporate and price new and compounding risks, alter metrics to facilitate 
long-term decision-making, and unleash a more sustained pathway to 
growth and development that makes economies and societies resilient and 
transformation-ready. Further, the author emphasizes the role of 
communications and engagement with people and societies to promote 
understanding and support demands for a transformation in policy, 
technology, and action. This is the essence of what the author hopes to 
encourage and accomplish with this publication. 

3. THE WHAT AND THE HOW OF DECISION-MAKING 

The author has established what needs to change to address risk and embed 
resilience in the era of climate emergency. The multi-layered assessment is 
extremely helpful in understanding why these changes are needed. The next 
frontier is how to quickly engender changes in decision-making. Climate 
negotiations are in a quagmire in the face of multiple crisis and adverse 
geopolitics, and the perils of not achieving the global goal of the Paris 
Agreement—to limit temperature increase to 2 degrees, with best efforts to 
limit it to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels—are looming. With limited 
scope for revolutionary changes at the international policy- and decision-
making levels, the moot question is how do countries, governments, the 
private sector, and citizens take action to safeguard their development 
aspirations and be resilient to climate risks. Is there a lesson to learn from 
early movers— highly vulnerable small economies willing to tackle the 
existential challenge head on—like Bhutan, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and 
small island states in the Pacific? 

Conflict of Interest Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported 

by the author. 

 

REFERENCES 

IPCC (2022).  Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability 
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-ii/ 

Lazarus, Richard J. 2009. “Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: 
Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future.” Cornell Law Review 94: 1153. 
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1152&contex
t=facpub.  

  

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-ii/
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1152&context=facpub
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1152&context=facpub

