1.2 Broadening the Context of Climate Change Mitigation
This chapter places climate change mitigation, mitigation policy, and the contents
of the rest of the report in the broader context of development, equity, and
sustainability. This context reflects the explicit conditions and principles
laid down by the UNFCCC on the pursuit of the ultimate objective of stabilizing
greenhouse gas concentrations. The UNFCCC imposes three conditions on the goal
of stabilization: namely that it should take place within a time-frame sufficient
to "allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that
food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed
in a sustainable manner" (Art. 2). It also specifies several principles
to guide this process: equity, common but differentiated responsibilities, precaution,
cost-effective measures, right to sustainable development, and support for an
open international economic system (Art. 3).
Previous IPCC assessment reports sought to facilitate this pursuit by comprehensively
describing, cataloguing, and comparing technologies and policy instruments that
could be used to achieve mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in a cost-effective
and efficient manner. The present assessment advances this process by including
recent analyses of climate change that place policy evaluations in the context
of sustainable development. This expansion of scope is consistent both with
the evolution of the literature on climate change and the importance accorded
by the UNFCCC to sustainable development - including the recognition that "Parties
have a right to, and should promote sustainable development" (Art. 3.4).
It therefore goes some way towards filling the gaps in earlier assessments.
Climate change involves complex interactions between climatic, environmental,
economic, political, institutional, social, and technological processes. It
cannot be addressed or comprehended in isolation of broader societal goals (such
as equity or sustainable development), or other existing or probable future
sources of stress. In keeping with this complexity, a multiplicity of approaches
have emerged to analyze climate change and related challenges. Many of these
incorporate concerns about development, equity, and sustainability (DES) (albeit
partially and gradually) into their framework and recommendations. Each approach
emphasizes certain elements of the problem, and focuses on certain classes of
responses, including for example, optimal policy design, building capacity for
designing and implementing policies, strengthening synergies between climate
change mitigation and/or adaptation and other societal goals, and policies to
enhance societal learning. These approaches are therefore complementary rather
than mutually exclusive.
This chapter brings together three broad classes of analysis, which differ
not so much in terms of their ultimate goals as of their points of departure
and preferred analytical tools. The three approaches start with concerns, respectively,
about efficiency and cost-effectiveness, equity and sustainable development,
and global sustainability and societal learning. The difference between the
three approaches selected lies in their starting point not in their ultimate
goals. Regardless of the starting point of the analysis, many studies try in
their own way to incorporate other concerns. For example, many analyses that
approach climate change mitigation from a cost-effectiveness perspective try
to bring in considerations of equity and sustainability through their treatment
of costs, benefits, and welfare. Similarly, the class of studies that are motivated
strongly by considerations of inter-country equity tend to argue that equity
is needed to ensure that developing countries can pursue their internal goals
of sustainable development-a concept that includes the implicit components
of sustainability and efficiency. Likewise, analysts focused on concerns of
global sustainability have been compelled by their own logic to make a case
for global efficiency-often modelled as the decoupling of production from
material flows-and social equity. In other words, each of the three perspectives
has led writers to search for ways to incorporate concerns that lie beyond their
initial starting point. All three classes of analyses look at the relationship
of climate change mitigation with all three goals-development, equity,
and sustainability-albeit in different and often highly complementary ways.
Nevertheless, they frame the issues differently, focus on different sets of
causal relationships, use different tools of analysis, and often come to somewhat
different conclusions.
There is no presumption that any particular perspective for analysis is most
appropriate at any level. Moreover, the three perspectives are viewed here as
being highly synergistic. The important changes have been primarily in the types
of questions being asked and the kinds of information being sought. In practice,
the literature has expanded to add new issues and new tools, subsuming rather
than discarding the analyses included in the other perspectives. The range and
scope of climate policy analyses can be understood as a gradual broadening of
the types and extent of uncertainties that analysts have been willing and able
to address.
The first perspective on climate policy analysis is cost effectiveness. It
represents the field of conventional climate policy analysis that is well represented
in the First through Third Assessments. These analyses have generally been driven
directly or indirectly by the question of what is the most cost-effective amount
of mitigation for the global economy starting from a particular baseline GHG
emissions projection, reflecting a specific set of socio-economic projections.
Within this framework, important issues include measuring the performance of
various technologies and the removal of barriers (such as existing subsidies)
to the implementation of those candidate policies most likely to contribute
to emissions reductions. In a sense, the focus of analysis here has been on
identifying an efficient pathway through the interactions of mitigation policies
and economic development, conditioned by considerations of equity and sustainability,
but not primarily guided by them. At this level, policy analysis has almost
always taken the existing institutions and tastes of individuals as given; assumptions
that might be valid for a decade or two, but may become more questionable over
many decades.
The impetus for the expansion in the scope of the climate policy analysis and
discourse to include equity considerations was to address not simply the impacts
of climate change and mitigation policies on global welfare as a whole, but
also of the effects of climate change and mitigation policies on existing inequalities
among and within nations. The literature on equity and climate change has advanced
considerably over the last two decades, but there is no consensus on what constitutes
fairness. Once equity issues were introduced into the assessment agenda, though,
they became important components in defining the search for efficient emissions
mitigation pathways. The considerable literature that indicated how environmental
policies could be hampered or even blocked by those who considered them unfair
became relevant. In light of these results, it became clear how and why any
widespread perception that a mitigation strategy is unfair would likely engender
opposition to that strategy, perhaps to the extent of rendering it non-optimal
(or even infeasible, as could be the case if non-Annex I countries never participate).
Some cost-effectiveness analyses had, in fact, laid the groundwork for applying
this literature by demonstrating the sensitivity of some equity measures to
policy design, national perspective, and regional context. Indeed, cost-effectiveness
analyses had even highlighted similar sensitivities for other measures of development
and sustainability. As mentioned, the analyses that start from equity concerns
have by and large focused on the needs of developing countries, and in particular
on the commitment expressed in Article 3.4 of the UNFCCC to the pursuit of sustainable
development. Countries differ in ways that have dramatic implications for scenario
baselines and the range of mitigation options that can be considered. The climate
policies that are feasible, and/or desirable, in a particular country depend
significantly on its available resources and institutions, and on its overall
objectives including climate change as but one component. Recognizing this heterogeneity
may, thus, lead to a different range of policy options than has been considered
likely thus far and may reveal differences in the capacities of different sectors
that may also enhance appreciation of what can be done by non-state actors to
improve their ability to mitigate.
The third perspective is global sustainability and societal learning. While
sustainability has been incorporated in the analyses in a number of ways, a
class of studies takes the issue of global sustainability as their point of
departure. These studies focus on alternative pathways to pursue global sustainability
and address issues like decoupling growth from resource flows, for example through
eco-intelligent production systems, resource light infrastructure and appropriate
technologies, and decoupling wellbeing from production, for example through
intermediate performance levels, regionalization of production systems, and
changing lifestyles. One popular method for identifying constraints and opportunities
within this perspective is to identify future sustainable states and then examine
possible transition paths to those states for feasibility and desirability.
In the case of developing countries this leads to a number of possible strategies
that can depart significantly from those which the developed countries pursued
in the past.
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