Mitigation and adaptation relationships; capacities and policies

Climate change mitigation and adaptation have some common elements, they may be complementary, substitutable, independent or competitive in dealing with climate change, and also have very different characteristics and timescales [2.5].

Both adaptation and mitigation make demands on the capacity of societies, which are intimately connected to social and economic development. The responses to climate change depend on exposure to climate risk, society’s natural and man-made capital assets, human capital and institutions as well as income. Together these will define a society’s adaptive and mitigative capacities. Policies that support development and those that enhance its adaptive and mitigative capacities may, but need not, have much in common. Policies may be chosen to have synergetic impacts on the natural system and the socio-economic system but difficult trade-offs may sometimes have to be made. Key factors that determine the capacity of individual stakeholders and societies to implement climate change mitigation and adaptation include: access to resources; markets; finance; information, and a number of governance issues (medium agreement, limited evidence) [2.5.2].

Distributional and equity aspects

Decisions on climate change have large implications for local, national, inter-regional and intergenerational equity, and the application of different equity approaches has major implications for policy recommendations as well as for the distribution of the costs and benefits of climate policies [2.6].

Different approaches to social justice can be applied to the evaluation of the equity consequences of climate change policies. As the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) suggested, given strong subjective preferences for certain equity principles among different stakeholders, it is more effective to look for practical approaches that combine equity principles. Equity approaches vary from traditional economic approaches to rights-based approaches. An economic approach would be to assess welfare losses and gains to different groups and the society at large, while a rights-based approach would focus on rights, for example, in terms of emissions per capita or GDP allowed for all countries, irrespective of the costs of mitigation or the mitigative capacity. The literature also includes a capability approach that puts the emphasis on opportunities and freedom, which in terms of climate policy can be interpreted as the capacity to mitigate or to adapt or to avoid being vulnerable to climate change (medium agreement, medium evidence) [2.6.3].