The Need to Prioritize Action to Address Climate Change Risks by All Means

Abstract

This article describes some high-level guidance for actions to be taken immediately in order to address the ever-increasing climate change risks. The approaches considered span the full range as described in the literature and are described as the four pillars of climate policy. Pillar 1 describes mitigation, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, pillar 2 adaptation, the incremental or transformational change of systems to enhance resilience of natural and human systems against current and future impacts of climate change, pillar 3 carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in order to reduce the concentration of this long-living greenhouse gas in the atmosphere to a level that avoids global warming that might result in dangerous interference with the climate system, and pillar 4 radiative forcing management (RFM) which has been recently addressed in a draft technical report by the International Standardization Institute (ISO14082-TR), an approach that aims to reduce global warming quite fast, however without eliminating the main cause of global warming.