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Policy thresholds in mitigation

Nature Geoscience volume 9, pages 5–6 (2016)Cite this article

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Some climate change impacts rise fast with little warming, and then taper off. To avoid diminishing incentives to reduce emissions and inadvertently slipping into a lower-welfare world, mitigation policy needs to be ambitious early on.

Saturation of impacts can occur near physical limits, as when coral reefs are completely destroyed, or in relation to river floods that, however frequent and severe, can only affect so much of a country's total area due to topography. Saturation of impacts can also occur when adaptation partially offsets the impacts of warming. For example, migration towards urban centres can limit the impacts of climate change on the most vulnerable populations by increasing access to amenities such as air conditioning during heat waves9.

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Figure 1: Climate change impacts for various sectors.
Figure 2: Policy implications of different scalings of climate change impacts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Katharine L. Ricke & Ken Caldeira

  2. School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 30332, Georgia, USA

    Juan B. Moreno-Cruz

  3. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, 14473, Germany

    Jacob Schewe & Anders Levermann

Authors
  1. Katharine L. Ricke
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  2. Juan B. Moreno-Cruz
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  3. Jacob Schewe
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  4. Anders Levermann
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  5. Ken Caldeira
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Correspondence to Katharine L. Ricke.

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Ricke, K., Moreno-Cruz, J., Schewe, J. et al. Policy thresholds in mitigation. Nature Geosci 9, 5–6 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2607

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