A CLIMATE diplomat on Thursday highlighted the importance of assessment of climate risks to have reliable and sustainable decisions.

Glenn Banaguas, chairman of the Asean Science Diplomats and the president of Environmental and Climate Change Research Institute, said that both public and private companies must not just assess risks, but also manage them.

Companies may use the so-called Trip framework for climate mitigation, where each letter of the word stands for Track, Risk, Impact and Policy.

“Track”, he said, is tracking human resources and using climate scenarios and projections.

“We use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models in determining what is going to happen in the future,” Banaguas said during The Manila Times’ Sustainability Forum at the Admiral Hotel Manila.

R is risk assessment, or the identification of hazards such as storms, drought and landslides, as well as exposure to risk which leads to vulnerability, or those who are exposed to these risks.

I is for impact assessment, or what would be the effect of the risk in a given area.

“It is important to know what happened in these areas. You are not just validating models, you are also talking to the people about their actual experiences,”Banaguas said.

P is for Policy, or the alignment of programs and policies to local and global climate change programs, such as the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction policy or the National Climate Change Action Plan.

Banaguas said that some private companies, such as Philippine Airlines (PAL), the academe, and some municipalities and provinces have implemented his TRIP framework for climate sustainability.

PAL, he said, aims to be the first airline to be net zero by 2030.

In a subsequent interview with The Manila Times, Banaguas said companies must start with a climate risk assessment as it will be “very hard” to just assess it on one factor alone.

“You have to solve it in a more comprehensive way, because it is going to be very hard to manage the risk if you do not know how to assess it,” Banaguas said.