Ecf Position Paper
Ecf Position Paper
Ecf Position Paper
http://www.European-Climate-Forum.net
Position paper
The Challenge
The prospect of major changes in the earths climate as a consequence of
greenhouse gas emissions and other human actions presents one of the most
demanding challenges facing humankind in the decades to come. The challenge has
to be jointly tackled by science, policy, industry, NGOs, and the general public.
Numerous academic studies on climate change and on possible adaptation and
mitigation policies have been completed in recent years. However, most of these
studies have been performed with little direct interaction between the scientists and
the stakeholders immediately affected by the proposed mitigation or adaptation
measures. In parallel, many industries have made efforts to reduce emissions
through improved energy efficiency and carbon saving energy technologies. Much of
this work has been similarly divorced from academia. No clear picture has emerged
from these diverse efforts on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the
various mitigation and adaptation options proposed, let alone a consensus on the
desirable research strategies and policy objectives to pursue.
The European Climate Forum (ECF) is a mechanism to bring together
representatives of different parties concerned with the climate problem: the coal, oil
and gas industries, companies engaged in renewable energy technologies or the
manufacture of energy-efficient products, major energy users (including
transportation) , insurance and finance sectors, environmental NGOs, and scientific
experts investigating climate change and options for sustainable development. The
core activity of the Forum is to jointly define and undertake studies and disseminate
results that will contribute to providing a more robust foundation for the development
of long-term climate mitigation and adaptation policies leading ultimately into a
sustainable development path.
Research objectives
The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in
Rio de Janeiro and the follow-up series of Conferences of the Parties (COP) of the
Convention have highlighted the need for a stronger interaction between climate
policy makers, stakeholders and climate research. In particular, the complex
negotiations over the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, continued in The Hague, Bonn and
Marrakech, have raised many fundamental questions. These require extensive joint
studies by scientists from different disciplines, stakeholders representing various
sectors of industry, environmental NGOs and political decision-makers.
The Kyoto Protocol established for the first time firm commitments by the industrial
nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 5% relative to the
reference year 1990 by the time period 2008-2012. This negotiated transition from
an uninterrupted increase to a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions marks an
historical turning point in climate policy. Nevertheless, the Kyoto Protocol has not
been accepted by all nations, and reservations have been expressed regarding its
effectiveness. The Protocol also leaves open many questions regarding climate
policy after the first commitment period.
The 10-year horizon of the first commitment period of the Protocol is short compared
with the relevant time scales of the climate system, which range from decades to
many centuries. A 5% greenhouse gas emission decrease in 2012 by the industrial
nations is a significant first step towards a precautionary policy regime but has, by
itself, negligible impact on long-term global warming. According to the reports of the
UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), climate models indicate that
global greenhouse gas emissions, in particular CO2, will need to be reduced to a
small fraction of present levels within about a century if societies wish to avoid a
change in climate comparable to that which occurred at the end of the last ice age.
In the case of unregulated emissions, the predicted global warming lies well beyond
the historical experience of humanity both in magnitude and in rate of change.
Climate change predictions, however, are fraught with uncertainty. Climate change
computations by different climate models typically differ by a factor of two. The
models also cannot reliably predict climate instabilities, such as a collapse of the
conveyer-belt ocean circulation, a melting of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice
sheets, or the release of methane presently trapped in permafrost layers or in the
deep ocean. Even more unpredictable is the evolution of the global socio-economic
system on century time scales from which the emission estimates for the climate
change computations are derived. The impacts of a major climate change on human
living conditions and on sensitive ecosystems are also uncertain.
The response of stakeholders and decision makers to these innumerable
uncertainties varies widely, from support of the precautionary principle to a more
cautionary approach.
Advocates of the precautionary principle view the risks of climate change as
sufficiently large that they warrant immediate action to curb greenhouse gas
emissions. The developing nations, which represent three quarters of the world
population, but contribute only a third of the present greenhouse gas emissions from
fossil fuels, are not included in the emission reductions under the Kyoto Protocol.
Yet they aspire to the same living standards as the industrial nations. This implies
that, applied on a global scale, the present per capita greenhouse gas emissions of
the industrial nations will need to be reduced by at least one order of magnitude if
the goal is to limit future climate change to the range of natural climate variability.
The transition to a low-carbon or a carbonfree energy system over a time scale of a
hundred years requires major technological change. Such change becomes more
expensive and difficult to achieve the longer the transition process is delayed. By
initially focussing on the 10-year horizon, the Kyoto process tends to emphasize
measures that are cost-effective in the short-term. However, many of these shortterm options have limited long-term global mitigation potential. The technology for
large-scale emission reductions, such as solar energy in combination with hydrogen
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technology, exists, but is not yet competitive on the free market place. A long-term
climate policy needs to anticipate the estimated rapid increase in emission reduction
costs once the present negative to low cost options are exhausted (cf. IPCC, 2nd and
3rd reports). Unless timely R&D, commercialisation and market diffusion policies are
introduced, this could well present a barrier to deep emission reductions in two or
more decades. An early start may be essential to overcome this barrier.
Protagonists of a more cautionary approach argue, on the other hand, that the long
time scales of the climate system should be used to reduce uncertainties and
develop alternative technological options before embarking on specific climate
programmes. Premature decisions for a particular technological path could well lead
to a lock-in of sub-optimal solutions which cannot be readily adjusted later to reflect
new scientific insights and unforeseen technological advances. The use of fossil
fuels will remain unavoidable and can be expected to increase during the next
decades. Thus, the efficiency of fossil fuel use should be increased by technical
measures and R&D efforts. The potential of carbon capture and sequestration
should be further explored. The call for subsidies for renewable energy technologies
is based on learning-by-doing curves derived from past experience. However, past
experience may not be appropriate in this instance and the ability of technology to
respond to market forces in a rapidly-evolving global information economy may be
greater than previously thought. In the long run, the use of renewable energies can
only be increased substantially if they become competitive on the world energy
markets.
Research Programme
These differing assessments of the role of uncertainties need to be addressed, and
where possible quantified, in order to develop flexible, efficient, effective and
equitable strategies for dealing with long-term climate risks. The ECF research
programme will accordingly focus on the long-term implications of climate change in
relation to climate policy. Research themes will include investigations of the timeintegrated global mitigation potentials of alternative greenhouse gas abatement
technologies; studies of the linkages between technological change and climate
policy instruments; investigations of the interrelation between policy, public
preferences, public awareness and information dissemination; and the impact of
major regional differences on these interrelated issues.
These general research themes will be supported by specific investigations of
climate change impacts and adaptation measures, for example with respect to
extreme weather events and climate instabilities; socio-economic data analyses,
particularly on the regional scale; and the development of modelling tools, including
a hierarchy of coupled climate-socio-economic models.
In a first step, ECF proposes to carry out four projects:
1) Instruments for climate policy;
2) Coping with extreme weather events and rapid climate change;
3) Technology assessment; and
4) Data pool: building a Sustainability Geoscope
The principal goals of the projects, which are presently still in a definition phase, are
outlined in the following appendices.
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Appendix 2. Coping with extreme weather events and rapid climate change
A change in climate can lead to altered frequencies and intensities of extreme weather in a
number of ways. At the simplest level, a shift in the mean value of climate for example,
seasonal mean temperature or precipitation will alter the probability of occurrence of the
tails of the distribution. If the variance of the distribution is also affected by climate change
then more substantial and complex changes in the probability of extreme weather events can
occur. Substantial work has been completed in this area in recent years, although detecting
changes in observed extreme weather events and attributing them unequivocally to
anthropogenic climate change remains problematic.
Less work has been undertaken examining changes in more complex extreme weather
phenomena such as changes in conditional probabilities or bivariate distributions. For
example, it may be that the occurrence of multi-seasonal droughts winter-summer-winter or
summer-winter-summer has more critical impacts for water resources, hydroelectric power
or subsidence than a single season drought. Similarly, it may be changes in the frequencies
of events with intense rain and strong winds or high temperature and high humidity that have
the greatest impact for the built environment and for human health. Overall, it is changes in
these dimensions of climate that will likely have the greatest impact on the economy and
welfare of nations. Business sectors such as insurance, transport, finance, water,
construction and health-care are exposed to these changing risks.
However relevant extreme weather events are defined, one thing that has been generally
lacking across a domain as extensive as Europe is a pan-continental perspective of
observed and predicted changes in extreme weather phenomena. This is partly because of
difficulties of data availability and data homogenisation across national boundaries and partly
because the definition of what constitutes extreme weather varies from country to country.
There is an opportunity for the European Climate Forum to champion studies that overcome
this limitation.
The above examples of analyses are fundamentally historical or statistical in nature. Another
area of work would be more process and/or model based and would seek to provide new
insights about the probabilities of climate warming triggering rapid and non-linear responses
in aspects of the coupled biogeophysico-chemical system. There are some examples of
emerging work in this area to draw upon, but new work should also be commissioned.
Thresholds, feedbacks and bifurcation points need quantifying.
Results from any of the above areas of work will have implications for the way environmental
and social activities and assets are managed and ultimately will condition the way in which
systems and organisations adapt to real or to perceived changes in climate. The European
Climate Forum should support work looking at the interaction between irregular or
discontinuous changes in the statistical and state properties of climate on the one hand and
the institutional response to such changes on the other, a response which itself maybe
irregular and discontinuous. Such is likely to be the essential behaviour of a quasi-rational
adaptive system making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Stochastic decision
models need coupling with stochastic climate generators.
Contact:
Dr. Martin Welp
European Climate Forum
c/o Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
P.O. Box 601203, 14412 Potsdam, Germany
Tel. +49 (0)331 288 2619
Fax +49 (0)331 288 2620
E-mail: [email protected]
Internet: http://www.European-Climate-Forum.net