Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?

Abstract

Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today's carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 46 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Climate change and the urgency to transform food systems

“…Several systemic and power-related issues, such as lack of coordinated climate action and vested interests in fossil fuel industries, are in part to blame. But also, unbalanced power relations within food systems hinder progress in adoption of mitigation strategies (42,43). Besides obstructing the lowering of emissions, these issues have also exacerbated inequities between high and middle-and-low-income countries, as climate impacts have thus far mostly impacted the latter (20).…”

“…Besides obstructing the lowering of emissions, these issues have also exacerbated inequities between high and middle-and-low-income countries, as climate impacts have thus far mostly impacted the latter (20). Stoddard et al (42) set out the structural issues that have prevented any 'bending of the curve', and in this section we will also explore how these structural issues result in trade-offs between equity and climate change mitigation in food systems.…”

On an Information and Control Architecture for Future Electric Energy Systems

“…This is drivem by the societal choice of decarbonization which will have two major ramifications on the electricity sector, first, a substantial number of generating units will be replaced by renewable energy resources. Second, there will be a substantial amount of new load, a prime example being the electrification of transportation [20], [21]. When generation becomes uncontrollable, as in the case of renewables, the balance between generation and demand will need to be maintained by incorporating storage to buffer imbalances between the two, and by changes in how demand is managed or controlled.…”

The Remaking of Institutions for Local Climate Governance? Towards Understanding Climate Governance in a Multi-Level UK Local Government Area: A Micro-Local Case Study

“…Harris [5] identifies multiple sources of what he terms 'pathologies' in climate governance at the international and national scales. Stoddard et al [26] review and attempt to explain the collective international and national failures to 'bend the curve' of greenhouse gas emissions and put the world on course for meeting the Paris Accord goals and keeping global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C. Parry et al [25] analyse the extraordinary scale of subsidies from governments for fossil fuel interests worldwide. The power of established fossil fuel industries and their supporters and clients in governments and other bodies, and country-specific barriers to action rooted in national politics and economic path dependency, generate multiple interacting 'pathologies' [5] that have meant that, so far, international and national climate governance and political programmes for decarbonisation have been seriously compromised and have failed to stop the rise in emissions, let alone to reduce them at the global scale.…”

“…The significance of local governance of climate policy as a source of exemplary and pioneering action across sectors [24] has been underlined by the well-documented and serious failure so far of national governments to implement international climate agreements, incentivise decarbonisation and set their economies on course for achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions, consistent with the goals of the Paris Accord [5,25,26]. Together, the literatures on emergent climate governance approaches at global and city scales provide a significant body of knowledge and theory on the benefits and failings of top-down and bottom-up policy development, contributing to understanding of multi-level governance for climate action and more generally for sustainable development [2,4,6,7,15,27,28].…”