The Need for a Holistic Approach to the Climate Crisis: Integrating Climate Intervention, Mitigation, Adaptation and Social Science Research Communities

Abstract:

The Paris Agreement, within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, sets a global temperature increase target of well below 2°C and encourages efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. To limit warming to these levels, climate intervention strategies may be necessary in addition to large scale mitigation and adaptation efforts. In the Community Climate Intervention Strategies (CCIS) project, we are exploring the development of a unifying framework to 1) develop future scenarios that integrate mitigation, greenhouse gas removal and solar radiation management in a way that is informative for policy and social science research purposes, 2) facilitate collaboration on the development of methods for impact analysis—common metrics and shared datasets for the assessment of risks, benefits, limitations and uncertainties of different strategies, and 3) foster communication across communities to ensure that research aims and methodologies balance the priorities of the multiple communities and stakeholders involved. Collaboration with experts in governance, ethics, and end-to-end assessments is vital to ensure that scenario development, proposed modeling efforts, laboratory studies, outdoor experiments, and impact assessments are informed by societal values from the beginning. This includes informing the process from development of initial research questions through to the end of scientific studies, and concludes with communicating outcomes for policy and societal decisions. A planned face-to-face workshop in April 2020 was postponed, replaced by a virtual workshop in October 2020. In between, a series of webinars were held on a range of topics related to the CCIS project. This presentation will briefly review the purpose and goals of the CCIS project, the work to date, and the plans for the next steps.