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Valentina Bosetti, a lead author of IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, says we should think of mitigation as an insurance policy against catastrophic events

Valentina Bosetti (Department of Economics and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei) is one of the lead authors of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She contributed to the Working Group III report presented last Sunday in Berlin: Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change.

The topic of Chapter 2 of the document, the one Bosetti worked on, regards the uncertainty of climate change assessment: how this uncertainty affects our perception and how to react to it.

"In reviewing the literature we seek to answer", Bosetti summarizes, "whether uncertainty means policymakers should devote only a limited amount of resources to mitigation policies or if it's a reason to intensify global efforts and we concluded that we should think of mitigation as an insurance policy against catastrophic events. Even when the likelihood of the most extreme events is limited, their consequences would be so catastrophic that rational people should decide to take out the insurance policy".

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