To Mitigate or To Adapt? Strategies for Combating with Climate Change (original) (raw)
Related papers
The complementarity and comparability of climate change adaptation and mitigation
WIREs Climate Change, 2015
Both mitigation and adaptation can reduce the risks of climate change. This study reviews the complementarity and comparability between the two, looking first at the global level and then at the national-to-local domain. At the global level, the review finds differing definitions and viewpoints exist in the literature. Much of the economic literature reports that global mitigation and adaptation are substitutes (in economic terms). In contrast, the scientific literature considers them to be complementary (in policy terms), as they address different risks that vary temporally and spatially. The degree of complementarity and comparability therefore depends on the perspective taken, although there is a policy space where the two can overlap. However, the governance, institutional, and policybased literature identifies that even if a global mitigation and adaptation mix could be defined, it would be highly contentious and extremely difficult to deliver in practice. The review then considers the complementarity and comparability of mitigation and adaptation at the national-to-local domain, in national policy and at sector level. The review finds there is greater potential for complementarity at this scale, although possible conflicts can also exist. However, the institutional, governance, and policy literature identifies a number of barriers to practical implementation, and as a result, complementary mitigation and adaptation action is unlikely to happen autonomously. Finally, the lessons from the review are drawn together to highlight policy relevant issues and identify research gaps.
To Mitigate or To Adapt: How to combat with Climate Change
The strategic interaction between mitigation and adaptation is analyzed with a non-cooperative game, where regions are players, and where mitigation and adap- tation are prefect substitutes in protecting against climate impacts. We allow for step by step decision making, where mitigation is chosen rst and adaptation sec- ond, and where the benets of mitigation accrue only in the future. If marginal costs of adaptation negatively depend on global mitigation and if regions are rel- atively rich in terms of income, they simultaneously invest in both mitigation and adaptation. However, if regions are relatively poor, they engage in mitigation only. JEL-classication: C72, H41, Q25
Mitigation, Adaptation, Suffering': In Search of the Right Mix in the Face of Climate Change
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
The usually assumed two categories of costs involved in climate change policy analysis, namely abatement and damage costs, hide the presence of a third category, namely adaptation costs. This dodges the determination of an appropriate level for them. Including adaptation costs explicitly in the total environmental cost function allows one to characterize the optimal (cost minimizing) balance between the three categories, in statics as well as in dynamics. Implications are derived for cost benefit analysis of adaptation expenditures.
To Mitigate or To Adapt: How to Combat with Global Climate Change
2010
The strategic interaction between mitigation and adaptation is analyzed with a non-cooperative game, where regions are players, and where mitigation and adaptation are prefect substitutes in protecting against climate impacts. We allow for step by step decision making, where mitigation is chosen first and adaptation second, and where the benefits of mitigation accrue only in the future. If marginal costs of adaptation negatively depend on global mitigation and if regions are relatively rich in terms of income, they simultaneously invest in both mitigation and adaptation. However, if regions are relatively poor, they engage in mitigation only.
1996
This paper deals with the often ignored issue of adaptation to human-induced climate change. Adaptation is not only inevitable but essential to fashioning the least-social-cost strategy to addressing climate change. The urgency for limiting climate change is inversely proportional to society's adaptability. Some mitigation strategies are incompatible with adaptation goals (e.g., reducing CO 2 rather than equivalent amounts of other greenhouse gases may compromise several adaptation goals) and climate change impacts-and, therefore, benefits-analysis must necessarily incorporate adaptation. The paper provides criteria for evaluating policy options, and identifies options compatible with both mitigation and adaptation that would also help address current urgent problems.
Adaptation and mitigation as complementary tools for reducing the risk of climate impacts
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 2007
This paper uses the likelihood of flooding along Brahmaputra and Ganges Rivers in India to explore the hypothesis that adaptation and mitigation can be viewed as complements rather than sustitutes. For futures where climate change will produce smooth, monotonic and manageable effects, adopting a mitigation strategy is shown to increase the ability of adaptation to reduce the likelihood of crossing critical threshold of tolerable climate. For futures where climate change will produce variable impacts overtime, though, it is possible that mitigation will make adaptation less productive for some time intervals. In cases of exaggerated climate change, adaptation may fail entirely regardless of how much mitigation is applied. Judging the degree of complementarity is therefore an empirical question because the relative efficacy of adaptation is site specific and path dependent. It follows that delibrations over climate policy should rely more on detailed analyses of how the distributions of possible impacts of climate might change over space and time.
Adaptation, mitigation, and their disharmonious discontents: an essay
The frequently heard call to harmonize adaptation and mitigation policies is well intended and many opportunities exist to realize co-benefits by designing and implementing both in mutually supportive ways. But critical tradeoffs (inadequate conditions, competition among means for implementation, and negative consequences of pursuing both simultaneously) also exist, along with policy disconnects that are shaped by history, sequencing, scale, contextual variables, and controversial climate discourses in the public. To ignore these issues can be expected to undermine a more comprehensive, better integrated climate risk management portfolio. The paper discusses various implications of these tradeoffs between adaptation and mitigation for science and policy.
To mitigate or to adapt: How to confront global climate change
European Journal of Political Economy, 2011
We analyze the strategic interaction between mitigation and adaptation in a non-cooperative game in which regions are players and mitigation and adaptation are perfect substitutes in protecting against climate impacts. We allow for step by step decision making, with mitigation chosen first and adaptation second, and where the benefits of mitigation accrue only in the future. If marginal costs of adaptation decline with global mitigation, high income regions simultaneously invest in mitigation and adaptation. Low income regions engage in mitigation only.
Mitigation and adaptation to climate change
Climate change produces significant social and economic impacts in most parts of the world, thus global action is needed to address climate change. In this paper I will study the different possibilities of mitigation from different points of view, and analyse the possibilities of adaptation to climate change. First, substantial reduction of GHG emission is needed, on the other hand adaptation action must deal with the inevitable impacts. According to my assessment, it is essential that coordinated actions be taken at an EU level. In my argumentation I will use a macroeconomic model for the cost-benefit analysis of GHG gas emissions reduction. I will analyse the GHG emission structure on a European and world level. Even in case of a successful mitigation strategy there rest the long-term effects of climate change which will need a coherent adaptation strategy to address. Although certain adaptation measures already have been made, these initiatives are still very modest, and insufficient to deal with the economic effects of climate change properly.
A perspective paper on adaptation as a response to climate change
2009
COPENHAGEN CONSENSUS ON CLIMATE copenhAgen consensus on climAte The Copenhagen Consensus Center has commissioned 21 papers to examine the costs and benefits of different solutions to global warming. The project's goal is to answer the question: "If the global community wants to spend up to, say $250 billion per year over the next 10 years to diminish the adverse effects of climate changes, and to do most good for the world, which solutions would yield the greatest net benefits?" The series of papers is divided into Assessment Papers and Perspective Papers. Each Assessment Paper outlines the costs and benefits of one way to respond to global warming. Each Perspective Paper reviews the assumptions and analyses made within an Assessment Paper. It is hoped that, as a body of work, this research will provide a foundation for an informed debate about the best way to respond to this threat. Adaptation to climate change impacts will be necessary, and may require substantial economic resources. Economic analysis of adaptation, including costs and benefits, is subject to similar complications and limitations that beset quantitative economic analysis of climate change mitigation. To make such analysis relevant for policy decisions, the analysis must incorporate three factors that define the economics of climate change. The first is uncertainty, in particular the risk of abrupt climate change, which is a major reason for urgency in addressing climate change. The second is improved calibration of economic climate change impacts, and the inclusion of non-market impacts. The third is equity and differential climate impacts at the fine scale, which will define adaptation actions in practice. Hence, there is a long road ahead in improving the tools for economic modelling of adaptation, and the mitigation-adaptation nexus. Meanwhile, the crucial question for policymakers is not the benefit-cost ratio for adaptation in aggregate, but whether and where specific adaptation actions are beneficial, what new policies are needed to support adaptive action, and what existing policies need to be changed or scrapped.