Climate change mitigation requires all countries to work toward decreasing the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere while improving carbon sinks that remove them. Individuals and businesses alike need to adopt sustainable behaviors while governments set targets, implement regulations and offer incentives.
Paths that aim to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C require vast investments in clean energy and carbon reduction – 10-29 times greater than recent flows.
Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Reducing climate change primarily relies on curbing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere. This can be accomplished either through switching to renewable energy, adopting cleaner transport systems and encouraging ecological industries or by strengthening Earth’s natural sinks — such as increasing forest cover and carbon storage capacities.
About one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial sources, such as iron and steel manufacturing, cement production and aluminum fabrication as well as chemicals used in manufacturing processes. Emissions can be reduced through alternative industrial processes or by recovering emissions for use elsewhere in manufacturing.
Many mitigation strategies offer additional benefits that extend beyond emissions reductions, including improving local economic conditions, supporting food security and protecting biodiversity. Such benefits help create public trust and deepen support for transformative climate action; aligned incentives can drive private sector investment into low-carbon technologies that support these goals; economists widely acknowledge the advantages of market-based approaches such as carbon taxes or cap and trade in terms of emission reduction than command and control regulation approaches.
Increasing Resilience
Increased resilience to climate change involves developing the ability to respond, adapt, and recover from hazards with minimal damage to human well-being, the economy, or the environment. To do so successfully requires actions spanning policy development, infrastructure implementation, service provisioning, planning, communications and more.
Energy efficiency, efforts to reduce air pollution (which causes over 100,000 premature deaths annually in the US), and conservation of natural landscapes that provide essential habitat for wildlife all present key co-benefits of mitigation strategies for sustainable development. Utilizing participatory decision-making can ensure public support and trust are preserved when transitioning towards a net-zero greenhouse gas future is fair and equitable.
Crysitic policies such as expanding clean energy markets, pricing carbon emissions and investing more in R&D for low-carbon technologies can create the certainty needed to spur private sector climate investment. Risk modeling and decision-making tools may make climate risk disclosure more efficient for businesses and investors.
Investing in Mitigation
Mitigation refers to any human-led efforts designed to decrease greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere or enhance carbon sinks, including energy efficiency measures, renewable energies switchover, reforestation efforts and altering land-use practices.
Climate change mitigation investments Sp and SL can bring multiple advantages for sustainable development, including supporting household livelihoods, protecting biodiversity, bolstering food and water security as well as other co-benefits. But they may come with risks and unexpected results.
Expanding and strengthening these interventions can increase their impact. This may involve switching from individual site approaches to mitigation banks that leverage economies of scale and technical expertise; or engaging public-private partnerships for derisking new investments while aligning domestic financial systems with sustainability goals.
Investing in Adaptation
Countries must invest in adaptation measures in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to mitigate climate change’s negative impacts, including building more resilient economies against drought, floods, heat waves and extreme weather as well as sea level rise.
Adaptation investments differ significantly from mitigation investments by not offering competitive risk-adjusted returns for private investors. Such projects might include restoring coral reefs to reduce storm damage, building infrastructure to cope with flooding or creating drought-tolerant crops – these projects often provide public goods that benefit communities directly.
WRI is supporting private investors to take on more adaptation and resilience investment opportunities by helping to develop new funding structures, including carbon credits for cost-effective climate resilience measures; an adaptive investments framework; mechanisms aligning public and private capital on climate-vulnerable countries’ investment goals, etc. All these efforts aim to address the huge financial gap that needs to be filled for adaptation and resilience investments in today’s climate-vulnerable nations. These efforts may help address that funding deficit for adaptation and resilience investment opportunities.