Suchergebnisse

"Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses, 7-8 April 2022. The conference featured research addressing the following special focus: "Responding to Climate Change as Emergency: Governing the Climate Emergency" and annual themes: The Nature of Evidence: Why the persistent challenge of universalizing evidence based approaches?; Assessing Impacts in Diverse Ecosystems: What are the impacts of climate change on natural environments in particular and universal views?; Human Impacts and Responsibility: How have we been agents of climate change, what does a politics of responsibility reveal?; Technical, Political, and Social Responses: How do scientists, technologies, policy makers, and community members respond to climate change?"--

In developing the basis on which climate change should be priced, I do five things. First, I review the ethical foundations for valuing future consumption relative to present consumption (i.e. social discount rates). Second, I report that the criterion for both assessing and prescribing economic policies should not be an economy's GDP, but an inclusive measure of an economy's wealth adjusted for the distribution of wealth. Third, I apply the resulting analysis to the problem of pricing carbon concentration in the atmosphere. I give prominence to future uncertainties. Fourth, I show that the existing models of human behaviour on the basis of which these questions have been analysed by economists have serious deficiencies, in as much as the idea of personhood embodied in them has been built on the psychology of confirmed egotists. Fifth, I sketch the motivations of a social being and show how the altered specification of the human person affects the social price of climate change.

Within the past 25 years, climate change has evolved from an issue of interest primarily to some natural scientists into one of the top priorities on the global policy agenda. Research in political science and related fields offers systematic and empirically well-supported explanations for why solving the climate problem has turned out to be more difficult than originally anticipated. After reviewing this research, I focus on four areas in which we know less: (a) institutional design features that may help in mitigating or overcoming fundamental problems in the global cooperative effort; (b) factors that are driving variation in climate policies at national and subnational levels; (c) driving forces of climate policy beyond the state, in particular civil society, the science-policy interface, and public opinion; and (d) sociopolitical consequences of failing to avoid major climatic changes. The article concludes by identifying key questions at the micro, meso, and macro levels that should be addressed by political scientists in the coming years. In view of the fact that governance efforts at the global level are progressing very slowly, greater attention to bottom-up dynamics appears useful, both for analytical reasons (there is lots of variation to be explained) and for normative reasons. Adapted from the source document.