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AbstractRisk assessment, perception, and management tend to focus on one risk at a time. But we live in a multirisk world. This essay in honor of the 40th anniversary of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) and the journal Risk Analysis suggests that we can—and have already begun to—strengthen risk analysis and policy outcomes by moving from a focus on the single to the multiple—multiple stressors, multiple impacts, and multiple decisions. This evolution can improve our abilities to assess actual risks, to confront and weigh risk‐risk trade‐offs and innovate risk‐superior moves, and to build learning into adaptive regulation that adjusts over time. Recognizing the multirisk reality can help us understand complex systems, foresee unintended consequences, design better policy solutions, and learn to improve.

AbstractThe 'tragedy of the commons' is a classic type of problem, involving multiple actors who face individual incentives to deplete shared resources and thereby impose harms on others. Such tragedies can be overcome if societies learn through experience to mobilize collective action. This article formulates a distinct type of problem: 'the tragedy of the uncommons', involving the misperception and mismanagement of rare catastrophic risks. Although the problem of rare and global catastrophic risk has been much discussed, its sources and solutions need to be better understood. Descriptively, this article identifies psychological heuristics and political forces that underlie neglect of rare catastrophic 'uncommons' risks, notably the unavailability heuristic, mass numbing, and underdeterrence. Normatively, the article argues that, for rare catastrophic risks, it is the inability to learn from experience, rather than uncertainty, that offers the best case for anticipatory precaution. The article suggests a twist on conventional debates: in contrast to salient experienced risks spurring greater public concern than expert concern, rare uncommons risks exhibit greater expert concern than public concern. Further, optimal precaution against uncommons risks requires careful analysis to avoid misplaced priorities and potentially catastrophic risk–risk trade‐offs. The article offers new perspectives on expert vs public perceptions of risk; impact assessment and policy analysis; and precaution, policy learning and foresight.

How can we explain the emergence of property rights from their absence, in the face of incentives to overuse open-access resources and obstacles to collective agreement on property systems? Blackstone said "necessity begat property," and Bentham said "property and law were born together," but neither explained the process of conception, gestation, and delivery. Modern economists have sought to identify the institutional mechanisms enabling the birth of property. This essay examines five potential answers to the puzzle of what begat property and the further questions they entail.

Solving the climate change problem by limiting global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will necessitate action by the world's two largest emitters, the United States and China. Neither has so far committed to quantitative emissions limits. Some argue that China cannot be engaged on the basis of its national interest in climate policy, on the ground that China's national net benefits of limiting greenhouse gas emissions would be negative, as a result of significant GHG abatement costs and potential net gains to China from a warmer world. This premise has led some observers to advocate other approaches to engaging China, such as appeal to moral obligation. This Article argues that appeal to national net benefits is still the best approach to engage China. First, appealing to China's asserted moral obligation to limit its GHG emissions may be ineffective or even counterproductive. Even if climate change is a moral issue for American leaders, framing the issue that way may not be persuasive to Chinese leaders. Second, the concern that China's national net benefits of climate policy are negative is based on older forecasts of costs and benefits. More recent climate science, of which the Chinese leadership is aware, indicates higher damages to China from climate change and thus greater net benefits to China from climate policy. Third, the public health co-benefits of reducing other air pollutants along with GHGs may make GHG emissions limits look more attractive to China. Fourth, the distribution of climate impacts within China may be as important as the net aggregate: climate change may exacerbate political and social stresses within China, which the leadership may seek to avoid in order to maintain political stability. Fifth, the costs of abatement may decline as innovation in China accelerates. Sixth, as China becomes a great power in world politics, and as climate change affects China's allies, leadership on climate policy may look more favorable to China's elites. Seventh, the design of the international climate treaty regime itself can offer positive incentives to China. Taken together, these factors point to a potential and even ongoing shift in Chinese climate policy. They illustrate how the international law and politics of climate change depend on domestic politics and institutions. And they suggest that the United States, if it too takes effective action, can make the case for enlightened pragmatism as a basis to engage China in a cooperative global climate policy regime.

This article recommends the key design elements of US climate law. Much past environmental law has suffered from four design problems: fragmentation, insensitivity to tradeoffs, rigid prescriptive commands, and mismatched scale. These are problems with the design of regulatory systems, not a rejection of the overall objective of environmental law to protect ecosystems and human health. These four design defects raised the costs, reduced the benefits, and increased the countervailing risks of many past environmental laws. The principal environmental laws successfully enacted since the 1990s, such as the acid rain trading program in the 1990 Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments and the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, were consciously designed to overcome the prior design defects. New law for climate change should improve on the design of past environmental law, fostering four counterpart solutions to the prior design defects: cross-cutting integration instead of fragmentation, attention to tradeoffs instead of their neglect, flexible incentive-based policy instruments such as emissions trading in place of rigid prescriptive commands, and optimal instead of mismatched scale. This article advocates a design for U.S. climate policy that embodies these four design solutions. It proposes a policy that is comprehensive in its coverage of multiple pollutants (all GHGs), their sources and sinks; multiple sectors (indeed economy-wide); and multiple issues currently divided among separate agencies. It advocates explicit attention to tradeoffs, both benefit-cost and risk-risk (including both ancillary harms and ancillary benefits), in setting the goals and boundaries of climate policy. It advocates the use of flexible market-based incentives through an efficient cap-and-trade system, with most allowances auctioned along multi-year emissions reduction schedules that are reviewed periodically in light of new information. And it advocates matching the legal regime to the environmental and economic scale of the climate problem, starting at the global level, engaging all the major emitting countries (including the U.S. and China), and then implementing at the national and sub-national levels rather than a patchwork bottom-up approach. In so doing it addresses the roles of EPA regulation under the current CAA and of new legislation. It argues that among environmental issues, climate change is ideally suited to adopt these improved policy design features.

Regulation may inhibit or stimulate technological change. The relationship depends on the technology of regulation - the design and instrument choice of regulatory policy. This essay examines the history of economic and social regulations over the last three decades, the explanatory power of theories of regulatory politics, the choice of regulatory instruments, the assessment of regulatory impacts, and the influence of each of these on the innovation and diffusion of technology (and of regulation). It concludes with recommendations for the future of regulation and technology.