Climate change mitigation encompasses everything from individuals adopting environmentally friendly habits to governments enacting regulations, offering incentives, and facilitating investments. It involves everything from building and promoting green energy projects, to reducing emissions from buildings and transport, as well as restoring forests or ecosystems that act as carbon sinks.
But current global mitigation efforts fall short.
Biological Carbon Sequestration
Biological carbon sequestration involves using plants and trees to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat in the atmosphere and contributing to climate change through natural and human emissions of CO2.
Plants possess the natural capacity to capture and store CO2. When growing, photosynthesis allows plants to absorb atmospheric CO2, then store it both aboveground and underground parts. CO2 may also be transferred back into the soil when leaves or branches fall off or it dies off altogether.
Trees are among the most effective at capturing and storing CO2, turning it into wood as they convert CO2 to lignified organic matter such as lumber. Restoring or improving forests, wetlands and native prairies not only remove CO2, but it can also enhance water quality, farm productivity, biodiversity conservation and decrease risks related to wildfire, drought and flood events.
Adaptation
Climate change mitigation aims to prevent greenhouse gases from increasing in the atmosphere by limiting fossil fuel emissions and expanding carbon sinks like forests, as well as using technologies that remove pollutants like cleaner cars to avoid certain emissions.
Adaptation refers to any effort to adjust natural or human systems in response to predicted climate changes, so as to mitigate harm or take advantage of opportunities. It may involve building or retrofitting infrastructure like beach nourishment systems to protect coastal areas against flooding, or more natural solutions like restoring wetlands that buffer hurricanes; behavior changes might even include choosing energy-efficient appliances.
EPA provides numerous resources to aid communities in adapting to climate change. Their website features many of these, as well as reports covering topics like disaster risk analysis or cost-benefit analyses of different policies.
Clean Energy
An essential strategy to combat climate change lies in the development of renewable energy technologies that offer clean, affordable, reliable power that also generates other tangible benefits such as job creation and local economic development. Investment in such technologies also creates employment opportunities and spurs local economic development efforts.
Other mitigation strategies include changing behaviors or improving infrastructure efficiency to lower emissions. Restoring and conserving natural carbon sinks may be effective ways of extracting carbon from the atmosphere.
Clean energy refers to sources that do not emit climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions when operating, including solar, wind and nuclear power as well as regenerative agricultural practices. While these energy sources do not produce zero environmental impacts during production systems, their inclusion into sustainable production systems must still be ensured for maximum benefit. EPA offers tools, resources and information about energy efficiency and renewable energy via its Clean Energy Page while its Integrated Assessment Toolkit has information and resources tailored specifically for state and local governments.
Technology
Climate change mitigation technologies focus on decreasing emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by either decreasing their sources (like switching to renewable energy, improving energy efficiency or shifting towards regenerative agriculture) or by increasing sinks that absorb them (reforestation).
There are also technologies that can directly remove CO2 from the air by mimicking nature’s carbon fixation process, called negative emissions technologies (NET), which are considered part of a solution to climate change by most scenarios of stabilization put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; however, such measures should not replace efforts related to cutting GHG emissions [29].
Solar geoengineering – which involves the launch of large sunshades into space to reflect sunlight away from Earth – and ocean seeding to alter rainfall patterns and increase carbon absorption are not likely to significantly lower global temperatures in the long term, as well as risk aggravating climate change when discontinued.