Building Climate Equity: Creating a New Approach from the Ground Up

The report draws on 30 real-world examples from developing and developed countries that demonstrate how this "capabilities approach" can achieve ambitious low-carbon and adaptation goals while simultaneously enhancing access to decent livelihoods, healthy food, quality housing, physical safety and other capabilities for individuals, communities and nations.The report's emphasis on capabilities can also help advance discussions in the UN climate negotiations about the principle of "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

Social signals and sustainability: ambiguity about motivations can affect status perceptions of efficiency and curtailment behaviors

Perceived status can affect the diffusion of pro-environmental behaviors and sustainable consumption. However, the status of different forms of sustainable consumption has not been adequately explored. Previous studies suggest that curtailment behaviors are associated with low or neutral status, while efficiency behaviors are associated with high status. However, these studies have generally examined a small number of behaviors. Drawing from costly signaling theory, we developed a mixed methods study to explore whether and why pro-environmental behaviors are perceived to be associated with high or low status, the perceived motivation for those behaviors, and the relationship between motivation and status. We conducted structured, interactive interviews with 71 participants to explore perceptions of 19 behaviors. Using quantitative and qualitative analyses, we find that efficiency is rated higher status than curtailment largely due to monetary considerations. Efficiency is also perceived to be motivated by environmental concern to a greater degree than curtailment. Understanding the motivation for behaviors clarifies the social signal because it provides insights into whether one is incurring personal costs. Importantly, it is often unclear whether low-cost curtailment behaviors are adopted by choice rather than financial need. Ambiguity about the intentionality of behaviors results in such behaviors being perceived as lower status. Those who argue that curtailment will be necessary for long-term sustainability must address status perceptions because social stigmas could hinder their adoption. Overcoming such stigmas may require, indicating that curtailment behaviors are voluntary, but it may be more effective to use social or economic mechanisms to increase efficiency behaviors

A Code of Conduct for Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal Research

Given the clear need to inform societal decision-making on the role marine Carbon Dioxide Removal (mCDR) can play in solving the climate crisis, it is imperative that researchers begin to answer questions about its effectiveness and impacts. Yet overly hasty deployment of new ocean-based climate interventions risks harm to communities and ecosystems and could jeopardize public perception of the field as a whole. In addition, the harms, risks and benefits of mCDR efforts are unlikely to be evenly distributed. Unabated, climate change could have a devastating impact on global ecosystems and human populations, and the impacts of mCDR should be contemplated in this context. This Code of Conduct exclusively applies to mCDR research and does not attempt to put any affiliated risk in the context of the risk of delaying climate action. Its purpose is to ensure that the impacts of mCDR research activities themselves are adequately understood and accounted for as they progress. It provides a roadmap of processes, procedures, and activities that project leads should follow to ensure that decisions regarding whether, when, where, and how to conduct mCDR research are informed by relevant ethical, scientific, economic, environmental, and regulatory considerations

Ethical choices behind quantifications of fair contributions under the Paris Agreement

The Parties to the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement agreed to act on the basis of equity to protect the climate system. Equitable effort sharing is an irreducibly normative matter, yet some influential studies have sought to create quantitative indicators of equitable effort that claim to be value-neutral (despite evident biases). Many of these studies fail to clarify the ethical principles underlying their indicators, some mislabel approaches that favour wealthy nations as ‘equity approaches’ and some combine contradictory indicators into composites we call derivative benchmarks. This Perspective reviews influential climate effort-sharing assessments and presents guidelines for developing and adjudicating policy-relevant (but not ethically neutral) equity research

Why equity is fundamental in climate change policy research

The editorial article rebuts the common assertions that equity is irrelevant in a post Paris climate research and argue that analyses of equity and justice are essential for our ability to understand climate politics and contribute to concrete efforts to achieve adequate, fair and enduring climate action for present and future generations

Three decades of climate mitigation: why haven't we bent the global emissions curve?

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today's carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm

Mapping Emergence: Network Analysis of Climate Change Media Coverage

Abstract: Network analysis is an established methodology in many disciplines. Attention to both the roles of actors and network structure has contributed to our understanding of mechanisms that are neither internal nor external to actors, but depend on the interactions among them. Media portrayals of climate change have been investigated by a number of researchers but most of this work has either used content analysis to delineate trends in coverage, or discourse analysis to explore particular aspects of representation. Complex issues such as climate change present a challenge to both strategies because they consist of multiple story lines and emerge from the interactions of many actors. This paper presents an experimental network analysis of Canadian media coverage of climate change between 1997 and 2006. The technique successfully provided a systematic view of the roles of key actors in several distinct storylines, and created compelling visualizations of the emergent nature of climate discourse. The primary limitations of network analysis in this case resulted from its ambiguous stance on agency and from practical coding decisions, both of which suggest the utility of further exploration

Many faces, many frames : exploring the dimensions of justice and climate change policy decision-making

Climate change presents profound justice dilemmas because of its asymmetrical costs and benefits. This is complicated by the tendency of both climate change and justice to change their appearance across contexts. This dissertation explores how arguments about justice are used in debates about how climate policy should be designed. Part A focuses on how arguments about justice have been used in debates about ideal architectures for international climate policy. A framework for analysing international climate policy proposals is developed using literature from both the philosophy and policy analysis communities. This analysis identifies three archetypal approaches to climate change policy at this level, each of which has potential justice implications. Part B explores public perceptions of justice in mitigation and adaptation climate policy contexts. This section creates and applies a methodology to explore the arguments about justice considered relevant by lay public participants in a series of climate policy decision dilemmas. Among other results, this part highlights the importance of framing in considerations of justice in climate policy. Finally, Part C explores climate policy dilemmas currently faced by policy insiders at the sub-national level, and cross-examines the views policy-insiders and the public think each other have on these issues. This part of the thesis identifies a range of specific justice dilemmas at the sub-national level. It also suggests that mis-communication between policy insiders and the public may limit the range of climate policies considered politically feasible. Four lessons emerge from this dissertation. First, justice is pragmatically important when developing climate policy. Second, there has been a systemic lack of integration across academic, policy and public communities on questions of justice and climate policy. Third, climate change and justice have multiple faces. How climate change policy decisions are framed will shape the arguments stakeholders are likely to consider relevant. Finally, methodologically a mixed methods approach may be of use in other similarly ambiguous research contexts. Overall, explicit recognition of the importance and complexity of justice in climate policy decision-making may help us design more effective and desirable climate policies.Science, Faculty ofResources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute forGraduat

The challenges of studying capitalism and its discontents

Few topics are as important or contested as the relationships among capitalism, human wellbeing and ecological integrity. In her article ‘Can capitalism deliver environmental justice?’ (Bell 2015 Environ. Res. Lett. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/125017 10 http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/125017 ), Bell uses a seven-country comparison to explore how capitalism can either constrain or enable efforts to achieve environmental justice. This is an important contribution to these long-standing and recently re-ignited debates but also reminds us of the methodological challenges inevitably facing scholars attempting to engage with the big questions of capitalism and justice. Specifically the ambiguous and ideologically contested characteristics of these subjects leave scholars facing a series of hard decisions about how to operationalize studies and how to do so in ways that will be seen as credible and relevant even to those across ideological aisles