Instead of investing political capital predominantly towards mitigation, we suggest re-orienting the policy focus and paying serious attention to adaptation to climate change
By Nives Dolšak and Aseem Prakash
In July of
this year, President Obama announced a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions
from electricity generation by 32 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030. As
anticipated, this has kicked off a furious debate, with critics characterizing
Obama's Clean Power Plan as a job killer, and offering the "China
excuse" for opposing it. After all, why should the US reduce emissions
when China, the biggest current emitter of greenhouse gases, has not
committed to mandatory reductions? This is a powerful argument in a period of
economic crisis, growing income inequalities, and the fear that American jobs
are being shipped abroad to countries such as China that have not committed to
mandatory emission reductions.
Image Attribute: Air pollution
in China. Creative Commons; Nicolò Lazzati, 2014
The scientific
case for carbon mitigation is a powerful one. Societies need to reduce their
emissions of greenhouse gases before the tipping point occurs. Various reports
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attest to the need for
climate change mitigation. Exhortations by prominent global leaders such as
Pope Francis and inter-governmental efforts, such as the upcoming COP21
conference in Paris, are examples of the continued policy focus on mitigation.
Yet,
mitigation-based approaches have run into serious political problems.
Furthermore, it is not clear how countries such as China and India are going to
enforce mitigation targets domestically, even if they were to be persuaded to
sign on to mandatory emission reductions. As the vast literature on
international treaties produced by political scientists suggests, compliance
with these agreements tends to be patchy.
Instead of
investing political capital predominantly towards mitigation, we suggest
re-orienting the policy focus and paying serious attention to adaptation to
climate change. Examples of climate change adaptation measures include using
scarce water resources more efficiently, adapting building codes to take into
account future climate conditions and extreme weather events, and developing
drought-tolerant crops.1 The issues of drought, water
shortages, food shortages, rising sea levels, and over-worked electricity grids
need to be addressed urgently.2 Scholars, national governments,
cities, international organizations, and the IPCC acknowledge the importance of
adaptation.3 Yet, in terms of devoting real resources,
adaptation is being neglected. This needs to change.
Devoting
political and economic resources to adaptation will eventually create the
political momentum for serious, not just symbolic, mitigation policies. When
citizens are asked to pay for adaptation, they will begin to recognize the true
costs of global climate change for their communities and for their own
well-being. For example, the local government of a coastal city imposes a new
tax on households to pay for a new seawall that can withstand rising sea
levels; an electric utility imposes a surcharge on its customers to pay for a
new grid that can handle peak power demands due to high summer temperatures; or
the water utility company introduces a water levy to pay for water harvesting
structures it is installing in order to respond to changing rainfall patterns
characterized by short but intense downpours with huge water runoff. Faced with
these new costs, citizens will begin to appreciate the implications, for them,
of not addressing climate change.4 Consequently, citizens will
hopefully be less likely to invoke the "China excuse" for policy
inaction and be more willing to support climate change mitigation. Viewed in this
way, adaptation can be interpreted as a temporary, but strategic, withdrawal to
educate citizens of the dangers of ignoring climate change.
The political
opposition to mitigation has multiple justifications. As political scientists
have shown, policies that impose concentrated costs on a few actors, but create
diffused benefits for others, are likely to meet with strong opposition.5,6
Second, this opposition is accentuated when these costs are incurred by the
"policy losers" in the short run, while the benefits can be observed
only in the long run. Third, if these benefits are non-excludable, meaning it
is difficult to exclude others from benefiting from climate change mitigation,
this creates a "free rider" problem.7 Since few want to be
"suckers," actors will be reluctant to incur costs in order to create
benefits that the free riders can enjoy. Fourth, the opposition to the proposed
policy is likely to be especially acute if the policy losers perceive the
alleged free-rider to be a political and economic competitor who is steadily
gaining advantage across multiple issues.
The political
opposition to mitigation lies in the fact that mitigation imposes costs on the
US fossil fuel and energy intensive sectors while providing benefits that may
occur in the long run to a large number of unspecified people anywhere on the
globe. Not surprisingly, policy losers oppose mitigation policies. Furthermore,
the backlash against mitigation might be attributed to the rising economic and
political salience of China, the perception that American jobs are being
shipped overseas, and that China continues to build coal-fired electricity
plants while Americans are asked to cut down on emissions. For the West
Virginia miner, mitigation implies she/he will lose the major source of her/his
livelihood in order to subsidize affluent Chinese or Indian consumers. It is
difficult to explain to this miner, who is facing economic stress, that equity
considerations demand that we look at cumulative instead of current emissions.
In contrast to
mitigation, the political logic of adaptation is compelling. While successful
mitigation requires global collective action, adaptation can be successful even
when undertaken unilaterally. Importantly, adaptation-related investments
create local benefits, not global public goods. Thus, adaptation does not
suffer from the free rider problem—those paying for it will also benefit from
it. It is difficult to offer the "China excuse" for ignoring
adaptation.
Adaptation-based
approaches can leverage the poly-centric governance model that scholars at the
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy analysis have
developed. The core idea is that different collective goods are efficiently
provided at different scales.8,9 Instead of asking a single governance unit,
say the federal government, to provide all public goods, both scholars and
practitioners should look at varying scales of such provision. Furthermore, the
provision of public goods at different scales means that benefit spillovers can
be minimized, and those benefiting from the policy can be expected to incur the
costs as well. If adaptation requires city-level efforts, then the city government
can undertake the investments. If it requires efforts of multiple
jurisdictions, special adaptation districts can be created (such as school
districts or water districts). The bottom line is that adaptation can be
designed for any scale to ensure that: (1) it is provided at the most efficient
scale; and, (2) beneficiaries of adaptation-related investments pay for much of
the costs. In doing so, adaptation meets the canon of efficiency and, at the
same time, minimizes free riding.
We recognize
that adaptation is not the silver bullet and faces policy problems as
well.10,11 Some players that are vulnerable to global climate change may not be
able to afford to invest in adaptation.12 Although we recognize the problems
with foreign aid for environmental protection,13 as with mitigation, this sort
of a fiscal mismatch can be handled by appropriate subsidies and other types of
re-distributive policies. At the international level, the Global Environmental
Facility, a partnership of 183 countries working with civil society,
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the private sector to address
environmental issues, is making adaptation funds available to developing
countries. At the national level, modest assistance is available from the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Federal Emergency Management
Agency.
We are not
arguing for abandoning mitigation-based strategies. We are highlighting the
logic of political opposition to mitigation and suggest re-balancing the
short-term efforts towards adaptation. This is politically wise and practical.
It is also urgent, given the severe drought in many regions of the US, rising
sea levels, changing rainfall patterns, and declining snow packs. Investments
in a variety of adaptation-related infrastructure projects, such as water
storage, need to be made urgently. Utilities need to upgrade generation and
transmission to meet the peak summer demand. Governments—be it city, county,
state, or federal—will need to reconsider how to help economically
underprivileged citizens who do not have private resources to individually
adapt to these challenges.
By creating
local benefits, adaptation creates local constituencies that favor investments
in climate change policies. Not only does adaptation deprive politicians of the
"China excuse," it creates new political coalitions to promote pro-environmental
policies. As adaptation gathers steam, various groups will begin to recognize
the costs of ignoring global climate change.14 In the long term, instead of
crowding out mitigation, adaptation may create the political support for
aggressive mitigation policies.
About The Authors:
Nives Dolšak
is a professor at the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, University of
Washington, Seattle, and a visiting professor at the Faculty of Economics,
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has co-edited two volumes, The Drama of
the Commons (National Academy of Sciences Press) and The Commons in the New
Millennium: Challenges and Adaptation (the MIT Press). Her other work examines
political and economic factors impacting global climate change mitigation at
local, state, and national levels; linkages between commercial interests,
voting, and bilateral environmental aid allocation; and the diffusion of
market-based environmental policy instruments.
Aseem Prakash
is Professor of Political Science, the Walker Family Professor for the College
of Arts and Sciences, and the Director of the Center for Environmental Politics
at University of Washington, Seattle. He is the General Editor of the Cambridge
University Press Series in Business and Public Policy, the Co-Editor of Journal
of Policy Analysis and Management, and the Associate Editor of Business &
Society. He is the author of Greening the Firm (Cambridge, 2000), and co-author
of The Voluntary Environmentalists (Cambridge, 2006). His co-edited books
include Advocacy Organizations and Collective Action (Cambridge, 2010) and
Voluntary Programs: A Club Theory Perspective (MIT Press, 2009).
__________________________
Publication Details:
This article was originally published at The Solutions Journal
(Volume 6 | Issue 4 | Page 27-29 | Nov 2015) under the Creative Commons-Share Alike license.
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