The Handbook of Global Climate and Environment Policy

Robert Falkner, Robert Falkner

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118326251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Handbook of Global Climate and Environment Policy presents an authoritative and comprehensive overview of global policy on climate and the environment. It combines the strengths of an interdisciplinary team of experts from around the world to explore current debates and the latest thinking in the search for global environmental solutions.

• Explores the environmental challenges we currently face, and the concepts and approaches to solving these
• Questions the role of global actors, institutions and processes, and considers the links between global climate and environment policy, and that of the global economy
• Highlights the connections between social science research and global policy
• Brings together authoritative coverage of recent research by internationally-renowned experts from around the world, including from North America, Europe, and Asia
• Provides an essential resource guide for students and researchers from across a wide range of related disciplines – from politics and international relations, to environmental sciences and sociology – and for global policy practitioners

Part I

Global Policy Challenges

1 Global Climate Change
Matthew J. Hoffmann

2 Global Water Governance
Joyeeta Gupta

3 Biodiversity and Conservation
Stuart Harrop

4 Marine Environment Protection
Markus Salomon

5 Deforestation
David Humphreys

6 Biotechnology and Biosafety
Aarti Gupta

7 Global Chemicals Politics and Policy
Henrik Selin

Chapter 1

Global Climate Change

Matthew J. Hoffmann

Analysts have struggled to find new and creative ways to describe the scope and complexity of climate change – a problem that finds its sources virtually everywhere, from nearly all kinds of human activity (agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, energy use, land use), and that has effects that are being and will be felt across the globe. Perhaps the most apt characterization has come from Mike Hulme (2009), who eschews the label “problem,” preferring to describe climate change as a fundamental part of the modern condition. Yet, no matter how one conceives of climate change, there is little doubt that it is perhaps the global challenge of modern times. If climate scientists are correct in their understanding of the dynamics and impact of climate change, then the world needs to essentially decarbonize energy and transportation systems over the course of this century, with the lion's share of progress towards this goal taking place by 2050.

Mitigating climate change,1 taking the steps necessary to avoid its most dangerous potential impacts, is thus at once elementary (in that we know we need to drastically reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases) and infuriatingly elaborate (in that the pathways to such reductions are fraught with small to enormous technical, economic, social, and political obstacles). This chapter examines the global response to climate change from the perspective of this paradox. I first briefly describe the state of knowledge of climate science and argue that while climate scientists can and do tell us about the nature of the problem, they cannot tell us about what kind of a problem it is – i.e. what features are important and what we should do. In fact, deciding what kind of problem climate change presents is an inherently political and fraught process.

These decisions about the nature of the problem are not only difficult, they are also consequential because they shape what kind of a response we can and do formulate. I demonstrate this in the next section by comparing the different foundational understandings of climate change embedded in traditional multilateral and emergent transnational governance responses. These two governance systems differ in how they consider the global nature of climate change and in how they focus on proximate (greenhouse gas emissions) or fundamental (carbon dependence) causes of climate change. These differences shape the radically different politics and policy options available in the different processes.

This comparative exercise is not one of whistling past the graveyard or playing a tune as the ship sinks. On the contrary, understanding the foundation of climate mitigation efforts provides context for contemplating and (potentially) hope for developing the paths along which climate governance must (and/or can) proceed in the coming decades. I conclude, therefore, with some brief suggestions for how we can move forward reflexively both in the research and policy-making communities to bring together the two main approaches to climate governance.

Understanding the “Problem(s)” of Climate Change

Just getting one's head around the problem of climate change is a stiff challenge precisely because the problem can be conceived in multiple ways. There is the science of climate change – how increasing greenhouse gas concentrations affect global temperatures, ocean chemistry, and vegetation and the associated impacts that emerge from these changes. There are the social-economic-political understandings which focus, among other things, on economic development, the energy system, varied interests of states and other political actors. There is also the ethical dimension that concentrates on who faces the costs of climate change (mitigating it and the effects of it) both now and in the future (Gardiner 2004; Roberts and Parks 2007; Vanderheiden 2008). To further complicate matters, none of these dimensions provide objective understandings of the problem, but are rather wrapped up in the process of framing the issue in various ways that legitimate and even necessitate types of policy responses (Kahan et al. 2010; Hulme 2011). This brief chapter cannot do justice to all of the dimensions of the problem of climate change, thus this section focuses in on the latest understandings of climate science and how this knowledge can only take us part of the way towards understanding what kind of a problem climate change is because of varied political and economic aspects and framings of the problem.

Climate Science

The scientific logic of the climate change problem is relatively simple to describe (Hoffmann 2011; see also e.g. Maslin 2004; Dessler and Parson 2006; Houghton 2009). The Earth's atmosphere acts as a greenhouse whereby various gases (carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons, water vapor, and others) absorb solar radiation that would otherwise be reflected back into space from the Earth. This greenhouse effect itself is beneficial as it keeps the planet warm and allows life to flourish in the forms with which we are familiar. However, since the industrial revolution humanity has been emitting more and more greenhouse gases (e.g. carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons), mostly through the burning of fossil fuels, increasing their concentrations in the atmosphere and thus increasing the warming effect. Potential effects of increased greenhouse emissions include ocean acidification, along with the global warming that will likely engender sea level rise, increases in the frequency and severity of storms and droughts, changed precipitation patterns, altered disease vectors and trajectories, species migration, reduced agricultural productivity, and more.

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report laid out the most comprehensive examination of climate change to date. It found consensus in the scientific community that greenhouse gas emissions have significantly increased due to human activity and further that the modest temperature increases we have already experienced are “very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations” (IPCC 2007). Moving forward, even the relatively conservative IPCC language about the likelihood of further warming in the twenty-first century raises alarms when they note that extant climate models predicted between 2 and 4 °C of warming in the coming century (IPCC 2007). Put simply, in 2007, the scientific community considered that human activity was causing increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and that we could expect significant warming and other effects because of it.

Data and models that have emerged since 2007 have consistently produced more dire predictions about the rate of emissions growth and the warming that we are likely to see. In 2011, the National Research Council (2011) in the USA expanded the range of anticipated warming, noting that now scientists are telling us that:

Projections of future climate change anticipate an additional warming of 2.0 to 11.5F (1.1 to 6.4C) over the 21st century, on top of the 1.4F already observed over the past 100 years.

The International Energy Agency (2012: 15) concurs and estimates that if current trends of increasing energy use are not altered, the world is headed for at least 6 °C of warming. The current (political) consensus is that constraining global temperature increases to 2 °C is crucial, but that time is rapidly running out to do so. In 2009 a prominent gathering of climate scientists and policy-makers (Copenhagen Diagnosis 2009) declared what has now become a relatively taken-for-granted understanding: “If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2 °C above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly.”

Knowledge about expected warming from current and anticipated concentrations of greenhouse gases is increasingly troubling as the climate science community learns more about the kind of impacts we can expect. Here the news is frankly a bit frightening. The possible impacts of climate change are well known – glaciers melting, sea level rise, altered storm pattern and severity, altered precipitation patterns, and more – but it appears as though at least some impacts are coming sooner than anticipated in earlier models and with greater magnitude. Already in 2009, UNEP (2009) was warning that “The pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” Since 2009, a steady stream of reports have detailed how climate change has already begun and that the impacts like the melting arctic ice cap are coming more quickly than anticipated. The juxtaposition in 2012 of a record-breaking warm winter in North America and bizarre cold snaps in Europe have added an experiential element to the notion that we are already experiencing significant climate change.

However, even with increasingly sophisticated climate science, there are still significant uncertainties that complicate scientific understanding of the problem of climate change. Some of these are inherent uncertainties, in the sense that we simply will not be able to know for sure. These include comprehending and tracing:

• the intervening factors between concentrations of greenhouse gasses, temperature increase, and climatic changes like increased severity and frequency of storms, cycles of droughts and floods, and patterns of precipitation;
• how natural variability in the climate can mask and/or exacerbate the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions;
• the uncertain magnitude and geographically variable nature of the effects of climate change;
• the role that feedback effects and tipping points play in offsetting or accelerating the impact of global warming. (Hoffmann 2011: 10–11)

Beyond Climate Science: What Kind of Problem Is Climate Change?

Scientifically, then, we have a pretty good sense of the nature of the problem – its causes and consequences and its uncertainties. But even scientific consensus cannot tell us what kind of a problem climate change is: scientific understanding translates uneasily into policy-making at the global or indeed other levels because it does not make political, economic, technological, and social definitions of the problem obvious (Litfin 1994). In fact, scientific uncertainties, in some ways, pale in comparison to the obstacles and uncertainties that come with understanding what kind of problem climate change is from a social-economic-political perspective. Consider the following:

• Greenhouse emissions arise from virtually every human activity. Most current industrial, energy, transportation, and agricultural processes produce greenhouse gases. The world's economy significantly runs on fossil fuel use.
• Dependence on fossil fuels is uneven. While the global economy runs on fossil fuels, there is disparity between consumers and producers of fossil fuels – in other words some countries produce a lot of fossil fuels, others consume a lot of fossil fuels, and many that consume less would like to consume more.
• Per capita greenhouse gas emissions vary significantly. While absolute emissions from India and China rival those found in the USA and EU, the per capita emissions are wildly divergent. According to the International Energy Agency (2009), in 2007 the average person in the USA produced over 19 t. of carbon dioxide, while the average person in India and China produces 1.2 and 4.6 t. respectively.
• Historical responsibility for greenhouse gas concentrations is different from future responsibility. The states that contributed most to the current level of greenhouse gas concentrations (USA, EU) are not going to be the same states that contribute the most to the future level of greenhouse gas concentrations (USA, China, India).
• Protecting the climate promises diffuse benefits in the future, while engendering concentrated costs now. Put simply, it is difficult to generate political will, especially across political jurisdictions, to solve a problem when identifiable groups must pay up-front to generate benefits for the whole world sometime in the future. Scientists agree that the world must take action now to change the nature of our economy and wean itself off fossil fuels so that decades or even a century in the future, our climate remains hospitable for the world's great-grandchildren. This creates an enormous incentive to delay and significantly hampers efforts to generate urgent action in the present.
• Climate impacts will be felt differentially. Climate changes will be felt locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally, but with significant variation, and many of the poorest countries are likely to suffer the most dramatic consequences. In addition, the capacity to respond to climate changes also varies significantly. This produces wide disparity in the urgency felt about the problem. (Hoffmann 2011: 10–11)

So what is the problem? Is it a problem of overdevelopment or underdevelopment? Is it a problem of Northern historical responsibility or Southern future responsibility? Is it an economic problem or an environmental problem or an energy problem? Is it a problem of mitigation or adaptation? The very fact that climate change is in many ways objectively undefinable means that the framing of the issue creates the kind of issue we are actually dealing with (Hulme 2011). How we understand the problem creates the kind of problem that we try to solve.

Deciding what kind of a problem climate change is means focusing on particular aspects of the problem in formulating responses. This is both difficult and political. It is difficult simply because we cannot know which is the “right” decision. We have no means of ascertaining what aspects of climate change we should focus on and what kind of solutions we should devise to best respond to the problem. It is political because the choice of features and responses to focus on have differential costs and benefits for different groups of people. Actors have very different interests in the climate change problem if it is defined as a problem of mitigation or adaptation, for instance. These decisions are therefore consequential in addition to being difficult because they shape th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Part I: Global Policy Challenges
• Part II: Concepts and Approaches
• Part III: Global Actors, Institutions, and Processes
• Part IV: Global Economy and Policy
• Index