Abstract
Understanding how to sustain cooperation in the climate change global dilemma is crucial to mitigate its harmful consequences. Damages from climate change typically occur after long delays and can take the form of more frequent realizations of extreme and random events. These features generate a decoupling between emissions and their damages, which we study through a laboratory experiment. We find that some decision-makers respond to global emissions, as expected, while others respond to realized damages also when emissions are observable. On balance, the presence of delayed/stochastic consequences did not impair cooperation. However, we observed a worrisome increasing trend of emissions when damages hit with delay.
Highlights
Scientists have convincingly established a causal link between greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change (IPCC, 2014), the way in which citizens perceive the issue may be through the experience of damages
We experimentally show that the temptation to deviate from cooperation is generally stronger for strategies based on damages than emissions, cooperation could still be sustained when participants value sufficiently the payoffs from future interactions
We model climate change as a repeated social dilemma under three treatments – Control, Delay, and Stochastic – that vary the form taken by damages from the pollution externality
Summary
Scientists have convincingly established a causal link between greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change (IPCC, 2014), the way in which citizens perceive the issue may be through the experience of damages. News headlines are generally on the consequences of extreme events such as record temperatures, hurricanes or flooding that are outcomes of pollution and affect specific geographical areas. Another peculiar feature of climate change is the lag built into the earth system between the polluting actions and the system’s reaction in terms of climate-related human impacts. Suffering environmental stress may be what can trigger citizens into action to stop climate change more than national plans contemplating changes in emissions.
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