Climate Overshoot and the CARE agenda

The Climate Overshoot Commission's report on reducing the risks of climate overshoot is out and their proposal for a CARE agenda for climate change is spot on.

The Climate Overshoot Commission, a group of former high-level government officials including former prime ministers and environment ministers, has recently published the findings of their work in a new report. Brought together to consider the risk that we will overshoot the totemic 1.5 Celcius warming target, they lay out a comprehensive set of options to reduce the chance this will happen and for how to cope it it does.

While most of the media attention was focused on their recommendations regarding Solar Radiation Modification (SRM), the report covers the full range of responses. I won’t go into the details in this short post, but I wanted to focus on one small, but important element of the report - the CARE agenda.

The CARE Agenda

In summarizing the responses to the risks of climate overshoot the report lays out the policy options and their relative priority with the acronym CARE (see Figure 1):

• CUT emissions

• ADAPT to impacts

• REMOVE carbon from the atmosphere

• EXPLORE SRM

Figure 1. Diagram illustrating the 4 elements of the CARE agenda (Figure 9, overshoot report).

What’s nice about this is that the first 3, cut, adapt, remove, are all action-oriented. These are the climate policies that we know we need to be doing now. The last, explore, does not suggest we should implement SRM, only that we should consider it.

Think before you act, or decide before you know?

While the report recommends research into SRM it also recommends that nations commit to a moratorium on SRM activities with the possibility of large-scale transboundary harms, i.e., deployment or very large-scale experiments.

This balanced approach to SRM was immediately rejected by some, including representatives of the Non-Use Agreement. While their name suggests they might support the commission’s position, their reaction makes clear they are against even considering the idea:

“What is needed is not a global research program but a global agreement on restricting the development of solar geoengineering technologies.” [emphasis in original].

A sensible path forwards

No-one serious supports SRM deployment today. Instead what support there is for SRM is support for EXPLORING the possibility that it could help. While climate model simulations suggest SRM could greatly reduce climate risks, there are large uncertainties and several major challenges that might fatally undermine this idea.

If, and only if, these uncertainties can be resolved and those challenges addressed would it make sense to support deployment. This is why I think the CARE agenda proposed by the Climate Overshoot Commission is the only sensible path forward at this time: cut emissions, adapt to changes, remove carbon, explore SRM.

FIN.