Abstract
Despite the Paris Agreement target of holding global temperature increases 1.5 to 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, high-end climate change (HECC) scenarios going beyond 4 °C are becoming increasingly plausible. HECC may imply increasing climate variability and extremes as well as the triggering of tipping points, posing further difficulties for adaptation. This paper compares the outcomes of four concurrent European case studies (EU, Hungary, Portugal, and Scotland) that explore the individual and institutional conditions, and the information used to underpin adaptation-related decision-making in the context of HECC. The focus is on (i) whether HECC scenarios are used in current adaptation-related decision-making processes; (ii) the role of uncertainty and how climate and non-climate information is used (or not) in these processes; and (iii) the information types (including socio-economic drivers) commonly used and their limitations in relation to HECC scenarios. Decision-makers perceive HECC as having a low probability or distant occurrence and do not routinely account for HECC scenarios within existing climate actions. Decision-makers also perceive non-climate drivers as at least as important, in many cases more important, than climate change alone. Whilst more information about the implications of particular sectoral and cross-sectoral impacts is needed, climate change uncertainty is not a significant barrier to decision-making. Further understanding of individual and institutional challenges brought about by the ‘squeeze’ between adapting to HECC scenarios or to lower levels of temperature change (as those agreed in Paris) is essential to better contextualise the use of climate change information.
Highlights
The Paris Agreement—the outcome of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in December 2015—sets out a target to limit the increase in global mean temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels along with the pursuit of efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels
Results presented here support the notion that high-end climate change (HECC) scenarios, per se, are neither seen as more likely or urgent by decision-makers involved in the four case studies (EU, Hungary, Portugal, Scotland), nor are they generally perceived as more useful for current adaptation-related decision-making processes
Multiple explanations for this situation can be advanced, including as follows: the presence of cognitive biases and judgement heuristics, the influence of institutional contexts and timings, the presence/absence of enabling conditions for the uptake of climate change information, the presence/absence of barriers to the practical application of that information, and the lack of a broader contextualisation of adaptation decisions within the larger set of decision-making processes faced by institutions and individuals
Summary
The Paris Agreement—the outcome of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in December 2015—sets out a target to limit the increase in global mean temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels along with the pursuit of efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. The latest estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show the possibility of a 3.7–4.8 °C increase in global temperature by the end of the twenty-first century based on current mitigation efforts, with even larger ranges (2.5–7.8 °C) if climate uncertainty is included (Edenhofer et al 2014) This means that whilst the target of limiting climate change to well below 2 °C (or 1.5 °C) has been agreed internationally, recognising such level as a limit to significantly reduce risks and impacts, high-end climate change (HECC) scenarios are becoming increasingly plausible. This has been the case of adaptation-related decision-making, leading formal assessments to move from a technocratic and expert-led exercise towards a more participatory process of decision support (Jones et al 2014), referred to as transdisciplinarity (Pohl and Hadorn 2008; Kirchhoff et al 2013)
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