The climate changes we’re already seeing — like rising sea levels and shifting precipitation patterns — are locked in. That’s why adaptation isn’t an option; it’s a necessity.
Mitigation tackles the root cause of climate change by lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation strategies help communities cope with climate impacts that are already happening.
Policy Mechanisms
Climate change mitigation involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit the impact of climate change. It includes a range of measures, including switching to renewable energy sources; improving energy efficiency; carbon dioxide removal technologies; and restoring natural carbon sinks.
Unlike adaptation, mitigation measures have costs, but they also produce cost savings over time. Therefore, it is important to have robust mechanisms for evaluating the costs and benefits of mitigation. These include benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis and multi-criteria analyses.
Although not a direct climate change mitigation measure, reducing short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs) has significant co-benefits, including the prevention of millions of premature deaths and improving food security by avoiding tens of millions of tonnes of annual staple crop losses. In addition, SLCP reduction can help to slow the rate of global warming and complement efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Identifying these ancillary benefits helps to define the mitigation potential of investments that do not have adaptation as their primary objective (step 4).
Human Well-being
Climate change mitigation efforts are fundamentally motivated by the preservation of human lives and the environmental conditions that enable them. However, the field has been relatively superficial in its appreciation of theoretical claims about well-being that have profound implications for the framing of mitigation priorities and policies. This paper argues that hedonic and eudaimonic models of well-being are both relevant to the framing of mitigation research and policy, and suggests ways in which this can be achieved.
Professor Cox highlighted that climate changes impact health by increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events; reducing air quality; and spreading vector-borne diseases, such as ticks and mosquitoes. In addition, climate change impacts the water supply through increased temperatures that reduce sewage contamination of drinking water, and changing rainfall patterns that increase flooding and increase the spread of pathogens in recreational waters and in food production systems. There are many opportunities for addressing these impacts through societal-level mitigation behaviours.
Co-benefits
Many mitigation actions generate co-benefits – environmental, social or economic benefits that accrue as a result of greenhouse gas emissions reductions. These co-benefits lower the net costs of emissions reduction policies and offer participation incentives to developing countries. This knowledge can improve the design of new market mechanisms under an international climate change agreement to be negotiated in Paris in December as well as the Sustainable Development Goals adopted a few weeks ago.
The growing recognition of the value of co-benefits will likely help increase the ambition of developing and emerging nations when they are designing their commitments to mitigate climate change. Voluntary carbon markets have been a leader in the identification of co-benefits and the development of standards to assess, verify and monetise them beyond the certification of GHG emission reductions.
The ambitious plans set by the EU, US and China for reducing greenhouse gas emissions could deliver huge health co-benefits to their countries: more jobs, more lives saved from fewer deaths from air pollution and savings from avoiding costly fossil fuel imports. This policy brief, written by experts at the WHO European Region Pathfinder Initiative and Centre for Climate Change, Health and Planetary Health at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, calls for action that places health at the heart of climate mitigation strategies.
Tradeoffs
Many climate actions have co-benefits and trade-offs, although they are not all mutually exclusive. For example, energy efficiency improvements and switching to renewables can increase economic growth and improve air quality while also helping to reduce carbon emissions. However, they can lead to a loss of jobs in the fossil fuel industry.
Achieving net-zero requires rapid and deep reductions in global GHG emissions, balancing residual sources with sinks. This will be difficult given the world’s deep-rooted dependence on fossil fuels and vested interests in keeping them in circulation.
A recent study from PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency shows that climate action impacts on achieving other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These benefits are predominantly positive for most regions, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where climate measures can negatively impact food security and poverty alleviation through rising energy prices. These impacts are likely mainly due to large land requirements for energy production from wind and solar, which can lead to competition with agricultural use.