With global efforts to mitigate climate change lagging behind what is necessary to achieve Paris Agreement global warming targets, global mean temperatures are increasing, and weather extremes are becoming more frequent and more severe. When mitigation falters, adaptation to current and anticipated future climate conditions becomes increasingly urgent. This study provides a novel collection of adaptive capacity and adaptation readiness indicators, which it aggregates into a composite adaptation index to assess the relative adaptation performance of nations. Adaptation performance is assessed using two complementary techniques, a distance to frontier analysis and a dominance analysis. Developed countries perform relatively well and developing countries perform relatively poorly in both exercises. Adaptation performance is found to be closely and positively related to both national income per capita and greenhouse gas emissions per capita, highlighting the inequities of global adaptation performance. These adaptation inequities are consistent with the IPCC assessment that nations most affected by climate change are those that are least able to adapt and contribute least to the problem, creating a need for assistance from developed countries.
With efforts to mitigate climate change lagging behind what is necessary to achieve Paris Agreement global warming targets, adaptation to current and anticipated future climate conditions becomes increasingly urgent. This study provides a novel composite adaptation index to assess the relative adaptation performance of nations, using two complementary techniques, a distance to frontier analysis and a dominance analysis. Adaptation performance is closely and positively related to both national income per capita and national greenhouse gas emissions per capita, highlighting global adaptation inequities consistent with the IPCC assessment that nations most affected by climate change are those that are least able to adapt and contribute least to the problem.
Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased at a rate of nearly 2% per year since 1970, and the rate of increase has been increasing. The contribution of greenhouse gases to global warming constitutes an environmental management challenge requiring interdisciplinary effort and international cooperation. In an effort to meet this challenge, the Kyoto Protocol imposes limits on aggregate CO 2 -equivalent emissions of four greenhouse gases, although it permits countries to trade off one gas for another at specified rates. This requires a definition of trade-off rates, which the Protocol specifies as Global Warming Potentials, although these have been controversial since their introduction. The primary source of concern has been the constancy of the trade-off rates, both across countries and through time. We propose a new composite index that allows freely variable trade-off rates, thereby facilitating the design of efficient abatement policy. In a pair of exercises we compare our composite index with that used by the Protocol. In both exercises we reject the constancy of trade-off rates, although despite the significantly different weighting schemes we find a degree of concordance between the two greenhouse gas indices.
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