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1.
The ‘Anthropocene’ concept provides a conceptual framework that encapsulates the current global situation in which society has an ever-greater dominating influence on Earth System functioning. Simulation models used to understand earth system dynamics provide early warning, scenario analysis and evaluation of environmental management and policies. This paper aims to assess the extent to which current models represent the Anthropocene and suggest ways forward. Current models do not fully reflect the typical characteristics of the Anthropocene, such as societal influences and interactions with natural processes, feedbacks and system dynamics, tele-connections, tipping points, thresholds and regime shifts. Based on an analysis of current model representations of Anthropocene dynamics, we identify ways to enhance the role of modeling tools to better help us understand Anthropocene dynamics and address sustainability issues arising from them. To explore sustainable futures (‘safe and operating spaces’), social processes and anthropogenic drivers of biophysical processes must be incorporated, to allow for a spectrum of potential impacts and responses at different societal levels. In this context, model development can play a major role in reconciling the different epistemologies of the disciplines that need to collaborate to capture changes in the functioning of socio-ecological systems. Feedbacks between system functioning and underlying endogenous drivers should be represented, rather than assuming the drivers to be exogenous to the modelled system or stationary in time and space. While global scale assessments are important, the global scale dynamics need to be connected to local realities and vice versa. The diversity of stakeholders and potential questions requires a diversification of models, avoiding the convergence towards single models that are able to answer a wide range of questions, but without sufficient specificity. The novel concept of the Anthropocene can help to develop innovative model representations and model architectures that are better suited to assist in designing sustainable solutions targeted at the users of the models and model results. 相似文献
2.
This paper elaborates a ‘pathways approach’ to addressing the governance challenges posed by the dynamics of complex, coupled, multi-scale systems, while incorporating explicit concern for equity, social justice and the wellbeing of poor and marginalised groups. It illustrates the approach in relation to current policy challenges of dealing with epidemics and so-called ‘emerging infectious diseases’ such as avian influenza and haemorrhagic fevers, which involve highly dynamic, cross-scale, often-surprising viral–social–political–ecological interactions. Amidst complexity, we show how different actors in the epidemics field produce particular narratives which frame systems and their dynamics in different ways, promote particular goals and values, and justify particular pathways of disease response. These range from ‘outbreak narratives’ emphasising threat to global populations, to alternative but often marginalised narratives variously emphasising long-term structural, land use and environmental change, local knowledge and livelihood goals. We highlight tendencies – supported by cognitive, institutional and political pressures – for powerful actors and institutions to ‘close down’ around narratives that emphasise stability, underplaying longer term, less controllable dynamics. Arguing that governance approaches need to ‘open up’ to embrace strategies for resilience and robustness in relation to epidemics, we outline what some of the routes towards this might involve, and what the resulting governance models might look like. Key are practices and arrangements that involve flexibility, diversity, adaptation, learning and reflexivity, as well as highlighting and supporting alternative pathways within a progressive politics of sustainability. 相似文献
3.
Since it was first proposed in 2000, the concept of the Anthropocene has evolved in breadth and diversely. The concept encapsulates the new and unprecedented planetary-scale changes resulting from societal transformations and has brought to the fore the social drivers of global change. The concept has revealed tensions between generalized interpretations of humanity’s contribution to global change, and interpretations that are historically, politically and culturally situated. It motivates deep ethical questions about the politics and economics of global change, including diverse interpretations of past causes and future possibilities. As such, more than other concepts, the Anthropocene concept has brought front-and-center epistemological divides between and within the natural and social sciences, and the humanities. It has also brought new opportunities for collaboration. Here we explore the potential and challenges of the concept to encourage integrative understandings of global change and sustainability. Based on bibliometric analysis and literature review, we discuss the now wide acceptance of the term, its interpretive flexibility, the emerging narratives as well as the debates the concept has inspired. We argue that without truly collaborative and integrative research, many of the critical exchanges around the concept are likely to perpetuate fragmented research agendas and to reinforce disciplinary boundaries. This means appreciating the strengths and limitations of different knowledge domains, approaches and perspectives, with the concept of the Anthropocene serving as a bridge, which we encourage researchers and others to cross. This calls for institutional arrangements that facilitate collaborative research, training, and action, yet also depends on more robust and sustained funding for such activities. To illustrate, we briefly discuss three overarching global change problems where novel types of collaborative research could make a difference: (1) Emergent properties of socioecological systems; (2) Urbanization and resource nexus; and (3) Systemic risks and tipping points. Creative tensions around the Anthropocene concept can help the research community to move toward new conceptual syntheses and integrative action-oriented approaches that are needed to producing useful knowledge commensurable with the challenges of global change and sustainability. 相似文献
4.
Materialising energy and water resources in everyday practices: Insights for securing supply systems
Policies to secure energy and water supplies from the impacts of climate change are currently being developed or are in place in many developed nations. Little is known about how these policies of security, and the systems of resource provision they prioritise, affect householders’ capacity to adapt to climate change. To better understand the connections between resource provision and consumption, this paper explores the notion that different ‘energies’ and ‘waters’ can be conceptualised as material elements of social practices, which shape the way practices are performed. We draw on a study of Australian migrants and their experiences with different resource provision systems in multiple countries, time periods and contexts across three generations. We discuss the differing characteristics of energy and water provision across three broad resource ‘eras’, and the way resources enable or reduce resourcefulness, adaptive capacity and resilience. We find that policy makers may inadvertently reduce householders’ capacity to respond and adapt to climate change impacts by prioritising the resource characteristics of immateriality, abundance and homogeneity. We conclude that policy which prioritises the resource characteristics of materiality, diversity and scarcity is an important, underutilised and currently unacknowledged source of adaptive capacity. 相似文献
5.
In this paper we draw on Science and Technology (STS) approaches to develop a comparative analytical account of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The establishment of both of these organizations, in 1988 and 2012 respectively, represented important ‘constitutional moments’ in the global arrangement of scientific assessment and its relationship to environmental policymaking. Global environmental assessments all share some similarities, operating at the articulation between science and policy and pursuing explicit societal goals. Although the IPCC and IPBES have different objectives, they are both intergovernmental processes geared towards the provision of knowledge to inform political debates about, respectively, climate change and biodiversity loss. In spite of these similarities, we show that there are significant differences in their knowledge practices and these differences have implications for environmental governance. We do this by comparing the IPCC and IPBES across three dimensions: conceptual frameworks, scenarios and consensus .We argue that, broadly speaking, the IPCC has produced a ‘view from nowhere’, through a reliance on mathematical modelling to produce a consensual picture of global climate change, which is then ‘downscaled’ to considerations of local impacts and responses. By contrast IPBES, through its contrasting conceptual frameworks and practices of argumentation, appears to seek a ‘view from everywhere’, inclusive of epistemic plurality, and through which a global picture emerges through an aggregation of more placed-based knowledges. We conclude that, despite these aspirations, both organizations in fact offer ‘views from somewhere’: situated sets of knowledge marked by politico-epistemic struggles and shaped by the interests, priorities and voices of certain powerful actors. Characterizing this ‘somewhere’ might be aided by the concept of institutional epistemology, a term we propose to capture how particular knowledge practices become stabilized within international expert organizations. We suggest that such a concept, by drawing attention to the institutions’ knowledge practices, helps reveal their world-making effects and, by doing so, enables more reflexive governance of both expert organizations and of global environmental change in general. 相似文献
6.
There is growing public awareness of global risks that are related to land degradation, poverty, food security, migration flows, natural disasters and levels of violence and conflict. In the past decades, a wealth of performance databases has become available, and these are used to quantify those risks and to influence governance globally. We name the monitoring of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the establishing of priorities in humanitarian aid programs and the design of early warning forecasting systems. This article addresses a question that underlies the social and political application of risk indicators, namely: how reliable are such data that can be accessed or downloaded ‘in a few mouse clicks’? Reliability is an important issue for users of these data since poor data will lead to poor inferences. In addition, flawed data are usually related to poor and fragile countries, countries that need humanitarian aid and financial investments the most. In order to get a grip on this reliability issue, we explore the possible uncertainties attached to global risk-related indicators. In this article we (i) provide an overview of available data sources, (ii) briefly describe the way institutes aggregate risk indicators from an underlying set of basic indicators to form composites, and (iii) identify various sources of uncertainty related to global risk indicators and their composites. Furthermore, we give solutions for coping with uncertainties in the partial or complete absence of such information. We acknowledge that these solutions are insufficient to quantify all (cascading) uncertainties concerning global indicators, especially those related to ‘Campbell's law’. Therefore, we applied a ‘ringtest’ across data from leading institutes as for five open access risk indicators: governance, impacts of natural disasters, conflicts, vulnerability/coping capacity, and all security risks combined. We find that the coherence between indicators from different organisations but with identical definitions varies enormously. We find that indicators denoted as ‘impacts of natural disasters’ are almost uncorrelated across four organisations. However, indicators denoting ‘governance’ or ‘all security risks combined’ show remarkable high correlations. 相似文献
7.
Climate change adaptation, which has previously been seen as a national and local matter, is today systematically addressed by international institutions such as the UNFCCC, the FAO and the WTO. Research has focused on the overarching institutional architecture of global adaptation, particularly how it relates to development, political economy, efficiency and equity. In contrast to the transnational dimension of climate mitigation, the transnationalization of adaptation governance has received scant attention. By creating a dataset of adaptation projects, we examine transnational adaptation governance in terms of its scope, institutionalization and main functions. We find transnational adaptation governance to be firmly anchored within the UNFCCC, but a recent change towards adaptation governed by a transnational constituency can be identified. When non-state actors become integral to the project of governing adaptation, a ‘fourth era’ of adaption seems to be emerging. This new era is not replacing other forms of governing, but is emerging alongside and in a complementary fashion. In the ‘fourth era’, adaptation is increasingly governed globally and transnationally, and the attention is turned toward ‘softer’ forms of governance such as agenda setting, information sharing and capacity building. 相似文献
8.
A key challenge for effective, ongoing urban climate adaptation is to adapt institutions within urban governance. While an extensive foundation of empirical knowledge on urban climate adaptation has accumulated over the last decade, our image of institutional adaptation continues to be dominated by a focus on planning. Whilst understandable, this can obscure a fuller range of areas in which institutional adaptation to climate change is being pursued. Furthermore, methodological path dependency in large-N analysis via a common focus on analyzing formal planning documents risks a skewed perspective as such documents may only offer a partial view. Building on the rich range of work to date assessing climate adaptation in cities, and notwithstanding continued major gaps such as in small-medium cities, we now need to find ways to examine the diversity of institutional adaptation occurring in practice, and to comparatively draw on the situated interpretive knowledge of case experts within individual cities to do so. With this aim in mind, this paper explores institutional adaptation in a specific domain (urban water) in a sample of 96 major cities across six continents through a survey of 319 case experts, examining the diversity of institutional adaptation across contexts and exploratively probing its drivers. Findings show that multiple forms of institutional adaptation are being jointly pursued in cities across all continents, leaning towards ‘softer’ rather than ‘harder’ forms, but nonetheless revealing a wide range of activity. Patterns in drivers suggest a political explanation for institutional adaptation (e.g. involving change agents and political pressure) rather than a rational one (e.g. involving response to climate-related risks and/or extreme events). Overall, there is a need to combine parsimony with expanded interpretive sensibility in advancing large-N research on institutional adaptation diversity in comparative perspective. 相似文献
9.
This paper examines Earth System Science as a novel approach to global environmental change research. Drawing upon Michel Foucault's governmentality concept, the paper opens up the Earth System metaphor to political analysis and asks what it does to our understanding of nature and society as a governable domain. We trace the scientific practices that have produced the Earth System as a thinkable analytical category back to the International Geophysical Year in 1957. We also identify ‘the Anthropocene’ as a central and yet ambiguous system of thought for Earth System Science that harbours different strategies for sustainability in terms of (1) the persons over whom government is to be exercised; (2) the distribution of tasks and actions between authorities; and (3) contrasting ideals or principles for how government should be directed. 相似文献
10.
Good governance is widely seen as a prerequisite for effective natural resources management in the context of environmental decline and increasing anthropogenic pressures. Few studies quantitatively examine governance principles, or explore links between perceptions of community members and the governance that shapes their behaviour. Comparative work, spanning multiple sites and contexts, is rare. This paper measures community members’ perceptions of governance in twelve coral reef-dependent communities across four countries in the Wider Caribbean Region. In relation to established principles of ‘good governance’, multiple correspondence analysis indicates that perceptions can be reliably described using two themes, institutional acceptance and engagement. These explain over 50% of variation in individual perceptions. These measurable themes provide an indication of the social fit of governance arrangements, and have implications for expected outcomes, including support for management and compliance with regulations. Cluster analysis provides unique empirical evidence linking structural characteristics of governance to community perceptions; four of five good governance indicators were present in communities with positive perceptions. Results suggest a combination of supportive structures and processes are necessary to achieve governance systems positively perceived by community members. Findings are relevant to those seeking to design management systems and governance structures that are appropriate to local circumstances and will engender stakeholder support. 相似文献
11.
The Global Paleomonsoon as seen through speleothem records from Asia and the Americas 总被引：3，自引：0，他引：3
Hai Cheng Ashish Sinha Xianfeng Wang Francisco W. Cruz R. Lawrence Edwards 《Climate Dynamics》2012,39(5):1045-1062
The regional monsoons of the world have long been viewed as seasonal atmospheric circulation reversal—analogous to a thermally-driven land-sea breeze on a continental scale. This conventional view of monsoons is now being integrated at a global scale and accordingly, a new paradigm has emerged which considers regional monsoons to be manifestations of global-scale seasonal changes in response to overturning of atmospheric circulation in the tropics and subtropics, and henceforth, interactive components of a singular Global Monsoon (GM) system. The paleoclimate community, however, tends to view ‘paleomonsoon’ (PM), largely in terms of regional circulation phenomena. In the past decade, many high-quality speleothem oxygen isotope (δ18O) records have been established from the Asian Monsoon and the South American Monsoon regions that primarily reflect changes in the integrated intensities of monsoons on orbital-to-decadal timescales. With the emergence of these high-resolution and absolute-dated records from both sides of the Equator, it is now possible to test a concept of the ‘Global-Paleo-Monsoon’ (GPM) on a wide-range of timescales. Here we present a comprehensive synthesis of globally-distributed speleothem δ18O records and highlight three aspects of the GPM that are comparable to the modern GM: (1) the GPM intensity swings on different timescales; (2) their global extent; and (3) an anti-phased inter-hemispheric relationship between the Asian and South American monsoon systems on a wide range of timescales. 相似文献
12.
Understanding public perceptions of climate change is fundamental to both climate science and policy because it defines local and global socio-political contexts within which policy makers and scientists operate. To date, most studies addressing climate change perceptions have been place-based. While such research is informative, comparative studies across sites are important for building generalized theory around why and how people understand and interpret climate change and associated risks. This paper presents a cross-sectional study from six different country contexts to illustrate a novel comparative approach to unraveling the complexities of local vs global perceptions around climate change. We extract and compare ‘cultural knowledge’ regarding climate change using the theory of ‘culture as consensus’. To demonstrate the value of this approach, we examine cross-national data to see if people within specific and diverse places share ideas about global climate change. Findings show that although data was collected using ethnographically derived items collected through place-based methods we still find evidence of a shared cultural model of climate change which spans the diverse sites in the six countries. Moreover, there are specific signs of climate change which appear to be recognized cross-culturally. In addition, results show that being female and having a higher education are both likely to have a positive effect on global cultural competency of individuals. We discuss these result in the context of literature on environmental perceptions and propose that people with higher education are more likely to share common perceptions about climate change across cultures and tentatively suggest that we appear to see the emergence of a ‘global’, cross-cultural mental model around climate change and its potential impacts which in itself is linked to higher education. 相似文献
13.
《Global Environmental Change》2003,13(3):223-228
The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in August 2002 was the fourth environmental ‘mega’ conference since the first held in Stockholm in 1972. Its aim was to discuss how much progress has been made since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 and plan further action for the future. This paper first reviews the history and evolution of the environmental ‘mega conferences’ and outlines six core functions which they seek to perform. These are: setting global agendas; facilitating ‘joined-up thinking’; endorsing common principles; providing global leadership; building institutional capacity; and legitimising global governance through inclusivity. Using this evaluative framework, the outcomes, achievements and disappointments of the Johannesburg summit are discussed, along with an evaluation of the future role of such mega-conferences. The paper concludes that environmental mega-conferences do serve an important function in contemporary environmental governance, even though they are not the panaceas that some had originally hoped they might be. In many ways WSSD was a wasted opportunity for progress—politicians lacked the will for adopt ambitious action plans, which frustrated and disappointed participants in the vibrant civil society summit which accompanied the official meeting. The sustainable development agendas have now been set and consolidated, and the task facing politicians is to implement the agreements. This will be achieved and monitored in different fora to the mega-conferences that had originally opened the debates. The task now is for the UN to incorporate the views of citizen's groups and NGOs, and build on bottom-up activism, at the same time as top-down governmental decision-making. 相似文献
14.
Effective action taken against climate change must find ways to unite scientific and practice-based knowledges associated with the various stakeholders who see themselves as invested in the global delivery of climate governance. Political decision-makers, climate scientists and practitioners approach this challenge from what are often radically different perspectives and experiences. While considerable work has been done to develop the idea of ‘co-production’ in the development of climate action outputs, questions remain over how to best unite the contrasting epistemological traditions and norms associated with different stakeholders. Drawing on the existing literatures on climate action co-production and from translational perspectives on the science-policy interface, in this paper we develop the concept of ‘boundary agency’. Defining this as the agency ‘possessed’ when willing and able to translate between different epistemological communities invested in a similar policy and governance challenge such as climate change, we offer it as a useful means to reflect on participants’ understanding of the ‘co’ in co-production. This is in contrast to the more established (often academic-led) focus on what it is that is being produced by co-production processes. We draw from two complementary empirical studies, which explicitly encouraged i) engagement and ii) reflection on cross-boundary co-production between climate action stakeholders from different backgrounds. Reflecting on the two studies, we discuss the benefits of (and barriers to) encouraging more active and sustained engagement between climate action stakeholders so as to try to actively blur the boundaries between science and policy and, in doing so, invent new epistemological communities of practice. 相似文献
15.
What are the guiding principles of contemporary international governance of climate change and to what extent do they represent neoliberal forms? We document five main political and institutional shifts within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and outline core governance practices for each phase. In discussing the current phase since the Paris Agreement, we offer to the emerging literature on international neoliberal environmental governance an analytical framework by which the extent of international neoliberal governance can be assessed. We conceptualize international neoliberal environmentalism as characterized by four main processes: the prominence of libertarian ideals of justice, in which justice is defined as the rational pursuit of sovereign self-interest between unequal parties; marketization, in which market mechanisms, private sector engagement and purportedly ‘objective’ considerations are viewed as the most effective and efficient forms of governance; governance by disclosure, in which the primary obstacles to sustainability are understood as ‘imperfect information’ and onerous regulatory structures that inhibit innovation; and exclusivity, in which multilateral decision-making is shifted from consensus to minilateralism. Against this framework, we argue that the contemporary UNFCCC regime has institutionalized neoliberal reforms in climate governance, although not without resistance, in a configuration which is starkly different than that of earlier eras. We conclude by describing four crucial gaps left by this transition, which include the ability of the regime to drive adequate ambition, and gaps in transparency, equity and representation. 相似文献
16.
In this study, we used institutional analysis to investigate the design of innovative contracts for agri-environmental and climate schemes. The aim of such contracts is to better incentivize farmers for the provision of environmental public goods in comparison to current ‘mainstream’ contracts. For the analysis, we differentiated four contract types: result-based, collective, land tenure, and value chain contracts. To represent each type in the analysis, we selected 19 case examples from six European countries. Cases were identified through a mix of methods, combining literature review, web search, and expert consultation. After a structured data collection based on Ostrom’s institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, we focused our analysis on the involved actors and their roles in contract governance. Our results highlight the great diversity of public, private, and civil actors involved from the local, regional, national or international governance level, each performing one or several critical roles in contract governance. We found that it is highly context-dependent which actors assume certain roles. We also discuss how provision of environmental public goods through the contracts might potentially be impacted by certain roles and their assignment to specific actors. 相似文献
17.
This study seeks to refine literature on boundary work by exploring how stakeholders in the Coral Triangle Initiative, an international agreement between six countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, are forging relations across various domains and governance levels, and the outcomes of this process. We do this in an effort to increase its relevance to multi-level environmental governance, and understand the challenges that face such governance. We are also interested in the pathways leading to policy outcomes that are perceived as salient, credible, and legitimate to all stakeholders involved in governance. The study shows that boundary work is challenged by resource inequalities resulting in limited knowledge diversity, blurred boundaries between science and politics, and misaligned scales. We conclude that boundary work has an important temporal dimension that has often been neglected, and that literature on boundary work must provide a conceptual guide to understand tradeoffs arising as a result of stakeholders’ various strategies to engage in boundary work. 相似文献
18.
The release of excessive anthropogenic nitrogen contributes to global climate change, biodiversity loss, and the degradation of ecosystem services. Despite being an urgent global problem, the excess nitrogen is not governed globally. This paper considers possible governance options for dealing with excessive nitrogen through target setting, which is an approach commonly adopted to address global environmental problems. The articulation of the nitrogen problem and the numerous international institutions dealing with it, provide evidence of a nitrogen regime characterised by limited coordination and targets covering sources and impacts only partially. This calls for improving the nitrogen governance in the direction of more integrated approaches at the global scale. In this vein, the paper investigates two opposite governance options – here labelled as ‘holistic’ and ‘origin-based’ – and evaluates them for their capability to define solutions and targets for human-induced nitrogen. From the analysis, it emerges that origin-based solutions can be preferable to holistic solutions as they can be more specific and potentially have greater immediate results. Independent from which governance arrangement is chosen, what matters most is the speed at which an arrangement can deploy solutions to combat (fast-growing) nitrogen pollution. 相似文献
19.
The climate change research community’s shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) are a set of alternative global development scenarios focused on mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. To use these scenarios as a global context that is relevant for policy guidance at regional and national levels, they have to be connected to an exploration of drivers and challenges informed by regional expertise.In this paper, we present scenarios for West Africa developed by regional stakeholders and quantified using two global economic models, GLOBIOM and IMPACT, in interaction with stakeholder-generated narratives and scenario trends and SSP assumptions. We present this process as an example of linking comparable scenarios across levels to increase coherence with global contexts, while presenting insights about the future of agriculture and food security under a range of future drivers including climate change.In these scenarios, strong economic development increases food security and agricultural development. The latter increases crop and livestock productivity leading to an expansion of agricultural area within the region while reducing the land expansion burden elsewhere. In the context of a global economy, West Africa remains a large consumer and producer of a selection of commodities. However, the growth in population coupled with rising incomes leads to increases in the region’s imports. For West Africa, climate change is projected to have negative effects on both crop yields and grassland productivity, and a lack of investment may exacerbate these effects. Linking multi-stakeholder regional scenarios to the global SSPs ensures scenarios that are regionally appropriate and useful for policy development as evidenced in the case study, while allowing for a critical link to global contexts. 相似文献
20.
Unleakable carbon, or the uncombusted methane and carbon dioxide associated with fossil fuel systems, constitutes a potentially large and heretofore unrecognized factor in determining use of Earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves. Advances in extraction technology have encouraged a shift to natural gas, but the advantage of fuel switching depends strongly on mitigating current levels of unleakable carbon, which can be substantial enough to offset any climate benefit relative to oil or coal. To illustrate the potential warming effect of methane emissions associated with utilizable portions of our remaining natural gas reserves, we use recent data published in peer-reviewed journals to roughly estimate the impact of these emissions. We demonstrate that unless unleakable carbon is curtailed, up to 59–81% of our global natural gas reserves must remain underground if we hope to limit warming to 2°C from 2010 to 2050. Successful climate change mitigation depends on improved quantification of current levels of unleakable carbon and a determination of acceptable levels of these emissions within the context of international climate change agreements.Policy relevanceIt is imperative that companies, investors, and world leaders considering capital expenditures and policies towards continued investment in natural gas fuels do so with a complete understanding of how dependent the ultimate climate benefits are upon increased regulation of unleakable carbon, the uncombusted carbon-based gases associated with fossil fuel systems, otherwise referred to as ‘fugitive’, ‘leaked’, ‘vented’, ‘flared’, or ‘unintended’ emissions. Continued focus on combustion emissions alone, or unburnable carbon, undermines the importance of assessing the full climate impacts of fossil fuels, leading many stakeholders to support near-term mitigation strategies that rely on fuel switching from coal and oil to cleaner burning natural gas. The current lack of transparent accounting of unleakable carbon represents a significant gap in the understanding of what portions of the Earth’s remaining global fossil fuel reserves can be utilized while still limiting global warming to 2°C. Successful climate change mitigation requires that stakeholders confront the issue of both unburnable and unleakable carbon when considering continued investment in and potential expansion of natural gas systems as part of a climate change solution. 相似文献