From the chaos on Wall Street to the outbreak of listeriosis, Canadians have been hearing a lot about risk lately. It’s emerged on the campaign trail as well, where Stephen Harper has called a tax on greenhouse gas pollution an “economic risk” to Canada.

As each day brings fresh tales of disaster in the financial markets, some Canadians may indeed be asking themselves whether we can afford the cost of taking action on global warming now.

Before accepting that premise, we need a more careful look at the various risks we face, so that we can make the right choices about how to manage them. In other words, we can’t assess the risk of acting on climate change without looking at the risk of climate change itself and the benefits of taking action.

A report from Natural Resources Canada detailed the projected impacts of climate change across the country, finding increased risk nearly everywhere. The costs in southern Canada “associated with flooding, wind, hail and ice storms, hurricanes, tornados and wild fires” since 1996 are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Although we can’t say that all these events were “caused” by climate change, global warming is expected to make them even more frequent in the future.

There’s no doubt that tackling any major challenge involves some uncertainty and risk. But weight that against the enormous costs associated with global warming — not just to the environment, but to our health and livelihoods, in Canada and even more so in the world’s poorest places. It’s not hard to see which path is ultimately riskier.

Fortunately, each of the parties running in this election agrees that climate change poses a major threat. (For example, Stephen Harper has called global warming “perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity today”.) And most Canadians agree: an Ekos poll released this month found 63 per cent agreement with the statement that “global warming will be the most important issue facing Canada” over the medium to long term.

So we agree on the threat of global warming, but how risky are the alternatives to combat it? Canada’s timid climate action to date means we have little experience with tools like emissions taxes or “cap-and-trade” systems, the two main ways to put a price on pollution. And the unknown can be very intimidating.

Climate action isn’t just about avoiding the human and environmental chaos of global warming; it’s about cashing in on significant new economic opportunities. For example, here’s how California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger explains his interest in climate action: “The computer industry and the internet built the economy of the Silicon Valley. And now green, clean technology — along with biotech — will take California to the next level.”

Canada has incredible potential for green innovation as well. We have more than enough expertise and ingenuity to be a world leader in renewable energy, clean cars, or carbon sequestration. But until our federal government accepts the “risk” of taking much bolder climate action than we’ve seen from Ottawa in the past decade, we won’t be able to reap those rewards.

Clare Demerse is a senior policy analyst at the Pembina Institute, a sustainable energy think tank.