Climate change mitigation efforts aim to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen carbon sinks to lessen future warming, protecting vulnerable people and lessening future damage.
Policies related to renewable energy may range from national strategies aiming at decreasing coal, oil, and natural gas use all the way down to encouraging local communities to support renewable energy projects. Their benefits can both immediate and long term.
Reducing emissions
People can take simple steps to help mitigate climate change. From using cleaner energy sources for their vehicles to reducing their carbon footprint, individuals and individuals alike can help curb global warming. Furthermore, people can require their governments and businesses to support climate change mitigation efforts by pushing for cleaner technologies, cutting fossil fuel use, or investing in sustainable practices.
Agriculture, Forestry and Land-Use Sector Emissions can be significantly reduced if deforestation and ecosystem degradation were stopped, improving air quality while simultaneously improving food and water security, rural economies and protecting biodiversity.
And we can reduce emissions from transport by prioritizing electric cars and public transit systems, designing cities to be more compact, conserving ecologically valuable lands, implementing resource-efficient waste management practices, and stopping leaks from equipment or capturing methane/black carbon emissions in landfills – these efforts far outweigh their implementation costs!
Biological carbon sequestration
Biosequestration, or biological carbon sequestration, refers to the process by which living organisms such as plants and microbes absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide and store it as biomass in their bodies. Strengthening these natural processes is integral for mitigating climate change while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Planting perennial trees (agroforestry or single-crop plantations) is an effective way of increasing an ecosystem’s carbon storage capacity, while animals – especially large vertebrates – can increase it up to 250% through their daily activities.
Soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration is another form of biological carbon sequestration and can be increased through regenerative agriculture practices or increasing soil fertility. Restoring forests, wetlands, and native prairies helps reduce CO2 in the atmosphere while providing other essential services like clean water supply, wildlife habitat provisioning, wildfire protection and flood resistance; SOC stored by these ecosystems can even be utilized for value-added products like biofuels.
Shifting consumption patterns
Climate change mitigation entails the reduction of heat-trapping greenhouse gases that enter Earth’s atmosphere by either decreasing emissions or improving sinks that remove them. Reducing emissions primarily requires cutting energy consumption; however, energy efficiency measures also play a vital role. Energy intensity (a term commonly used in economic studies) measures this ratio of output per total work performed (Nakicenovic et al, 1996).
To limit global warming to 2degC or lower, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be cut by at least 45% over five years through sustainable policies and renewable energy sources.
Every individual can contribute to climate change mitigation by reducing emissions, but for maximum effect governments must act on a larger scale by encouraging sustainability, developing new technologies, enacting regulations and offering incentives; additionally they can promote low-carbon communities through encouraging local government and business partnerships.
Carbon removal
To meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement — to maintain global warming at 2deg C or less — and protect ourselves from climate change’s most destructive impacts, we must combine aggressive emissions reductions with large-scale carbon removal technologies, commonly referred to as carbon drawdown or negative emissions technologies. Carbon drawdown technology involves directly extracting CO2 pollution from the atmosphere using natural solutions like planting trees as well as technological processes like direct air capture that extracts it directly and stores it underground or soil storage sites.
Biological carbon sequestration can be enhanced through restoring and conserving forests, wetlands, and native prairies in order to enhance their capacity to store carbon. Not only do these ecosystems benefit climate, they provide essential services such as water filtration and habitat for endangered species – plus act as natural disaster buffers by reducing flood waters or wildfire.