The Dangerous Limits of Dangerous Limits: Climate Change and the Precautionary Principle

Shaw, Chris

doi:10.1111/j.1467-954x.2010.01888.x

Cited by 15 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…the lack of debate among decision-makers about the implications of the target and about the most effective means of implementation. From interviews and document analysis, it can be inferred that the 2°C target materialised in Europe as an easy and useful guidance for policy and a way for policymakers to construct climate change as a problem for the future (Shaw 2010). This explains why EU policymakers accepted the target in such a smooth manner.…”

Section: Framingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, it received increasing consideration by non-governmental organisations and growing attention by public opinion (Shaw 2010;Death 2011). Political leaders saw the necessity in having a target vague enough to avoid the perils of policy implications.…”

Section: Consolidation and Diffusion (1997-2009)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This target was first mentioned, to our knowledge, in a paper by Manabe and Wetherald (1967), who estimated a temperature response to doubling carbon dioxide concentrations by approximately 2°C (Randalls 2010). Since then, the 2°C figure has been discussed in various studies, including in relation to climate governance (Bodansky 2010(Bodansky , 2011Dimitrov 2010), the science-policy nexus and the diffusion mechanism in climate diplomacy (Gippner 2014), its implications and policy options (Geden 2010;van Vliet et al 2012;Höhne and den Elzen 2013) and conceptual or critical aspects of the target (Tol 2007;Shaw 2010;Boykoff 2011;Lenton 2011b;Jordan et al 2013). Other authors followed the chronology of events for investigating the multifaceted characteristics of the 2°C target: to consider different interpretations of the target (Jaeger and Jaeger 2010;Knopf et al 2012), to explore its strengths and weaknesses (Randalls 2010) and to examine its role as an intertwined element of science and policy (Oppenheimer and Petsonk 2005;Cointe et al 2011).…”

Section: Climate Change and The 2°c Targetmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The 2°C value falls into the consensus estimate of 1.5-4.5°C with regard to climate sensitivity (van der Sluijs et al 1998). Among the scientific community, this concept proved to be complex because of the estimated variables and the related uncertainties (Shaw 2010). Those include the equilibrium global mean surface temperature change following a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration relative to the pre-industrial period (van der Sluijs et al 1998).…”

Section: Framingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Governing by targets: reductio ad unum and evolution of the two-degree climate target

Morseletto

Biermann

Pattberg

2016

Int Environ Agreements

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Targets are widely employed in environmental governance. In this paper, we investigate the construction of the 2°C climate target, one of the best known targets in global environmental governance. Our paper examines this target through a historical reconstruction that identifies four different phases: framing, consolidation and diffusion, adoption, and disembeddedness. Our analysis shows that, initially, the target was science-driven and predominantly EU-based; it then became progressively accepted at the international level, despite a lack of broader debate among governments on the policy implications and required measures for implementation. Once the 2°C target was endorsed at the level of the United Nations, the nature of the target changed from being policy-prescriptive to being largely symbolic. In this phase, the target became a disembedded object in global governance not linked to a shared agenda nor to coordinated and mutually binding mitigation efforts. The 2015 Paris Agreement marks the last stage in this development and may have further solidified the target as a disembedded object. In the final part of the paper, we suggest ways to overcome the current situation and to develop the 2°C target into a fully fledged global environmental governance target.

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Section: Framingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Consolidation and Diffusion (1997-2009)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Climate Change and The 2°c Targetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Framingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Governing by targets: reductio ad unum and evolution of the two-degree climate target

Morseletto

Biermann

Pattberg

2016

Int Environ Agreements

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“…The 2°C target has emerged as the most prominent candidate (Randalls, 2010;Cointe et al, 2011;Jaeger and Jaeger, 2011) for fulfilling the mandate by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" (UNFCCC, 1992). However, meeting a temperature target alone cannot comprehensively avoid dangerous interference (Steinacher et al, 2013;IPCC, 2014); furthermore, some fundamental critique of the 2°C target has been levied (Shaw, 2010;. Nevertheless, a legally binding international adoption of the 2°C target has emerged as a central outcome of the 2015 Conference of Parties 21 (COP21) in Paris (COP21, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The level of climate-change mitigation depends on how humans assess the risk arising from missing the 2°C target

2017

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The established international 2°C target stipulates that global warming should be limited to below 2°C compared with pre-industrial periods; this has emerged as the most prominent interpretation of how to avoid dangerous climate change. The 2°C target was confirmed and made legally binding in the Paris agreement at the "climate summit" (Conference of Parties 21, COP21) in December 2015. But despite agreement on the target, greenhouse-gas emissions are unlikely to fall soon and fast enough to meet the target, raising the question of whether this target needs to be revised or reinterpreted, and also of why there is insufficient cooperation toward emissions reduction despite the risk of dangerous climate change. Previous theoretical and experimental research has suggested that cooperation towards emissions reduction is undermined by uncertainty about the threshold marking the transition to dangerous climate change. However, even if the threshold and hence the location of the target are known precisely, uncertainty ensues because of an unknown risk that arises from missing the collective target. How humans deal with this risk has not been investigated experimentally. Here we investigate how individuals behave under different risk scenarios if a collective target is missed. We perform economics experiments framed as a collective-risk social dilemma and directly examine the extent to which human subjects trade pay-out reduction for risk. We show that a reduced assessed risk arising from missing the collective target leads to reduced contributions towards the target; but that risk reduction causes the subjects almost to maximize their individual pay-out by balancing the effort to reach the target against the risk posed by missing it. We provide quantitative support for the argument that group contributions toward the collective target can be interpreted as proportional to mitigated warming. We conclude that reinterpretation of the 2°C target as less strict causes additional warming. However, our subjects deal effectively with a risk of dangerous climate change that they assess to depend gradually on global warming. Our results suggest that, if the additional warming is judged to be acceptable, a less strict interpretation of the 2°C target might support finding a trade-off between the effort put into climate mitigation and the risk of dangerous climate change.

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The difficult, the dangerous, and the catastrophic: Managing the spectrum of climate risks

Luers¹,

Sklar

2014

Earth's Future

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The notion of a threshold of dangerous climate change has been central to national and international efforts to address climate risks. However, the focus on a single target has now become an obstacle because it reinforces three key problems: it frames climate change as a distant abstract threat, it impedes integration of mitigation and adaptation, and it fails to recognize the diversity of values and risk perceptions of people around the globe. We present an alternative framework that considers both biophysical science and social values in characterizing the broad spectrum of climate risks. The framework also presents the options for managing these risks within four quadrants defined by the inherent limits to mitigation and adaptation. This quadrant‐based approach to managing the spectrum of climate risks restructures the climate change problem from avoiding a distant catastrophe to minimizing collective suffering.

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The Dangerous Limits of Dangerous Limits: Climate Change and the Precautionary Principle

Cited by 15 publications

References 26 publications

Governing by targets: reductio ad unum and evolution of the two-degree climate target

Governing by targets: reductio ad unum and evolution of the two-degree climate target

The level of climate-change mitigation depends on how humans assess the risk arising from missing the 2°C target

The difficult, the dangerous, and the catastrophic: Managing the spectrum of climate risks

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