Bryan Alexander

What impacts will climate change have on the future? What do they mean for higher education?

Today we continue our group reading of the new IPCC report, focusing on the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability document produced by Working Group III. Specifically, we’ll dive into the Technical Summary, which is an expansion of last week’s Summary for Policymakers.

Also, on May 26th we hosted a video conversation on the topic!  The Future Trends Forum held its first book club conversation:

We’ll begin today with a summary of the high points, then outline some first implications for higher education, and conclude with questions.

(For more info on this reading, click here. To look back at the previous installments of this series, click here and here.)

The IPCC divides this document into six parts.

1: Introduction

The report emphasizes that it includes new data, science, and approaches generated since 2014.  It argues for closer links between climate change mitigation, sustainable development, and social justice.

2: The Changed Global Context

Here the IPCC notes major changes since the last report, in 2014: rising interest in climate action; growing signs of the crisis, including the addition of more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere; the 2015 Paris Agreement actually issuing national climate targets; progress in alternative energy technologies.

The report then makes the case for climate action to integrate with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  Further, the document calls for climate action to not only occur across multiple domains (financial, technological, social, etc) but to involve complex, broad-based governance.

(Check pages 9-11 for a table of improvements balanced by challenges, a classic good news and bad news story)

3: Emission Trends and Drivers

Here the IPCC summarizes the best current science about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. All GHGs continue to grow, led by carbon dioxide and methane, although the rate of growth is less than it was in the earlier 21st century.

4: Mitigation and Development Pathways

Mitigation – actions designed to reduce global warming – are badly needed, as we are currently on track for “a median global warming of 2.4°C to 3.5°C by 2100″.  The report outlines many ways* to adjust human society and behavior to increase mitigation, then adds that more drastic measures may well be needed: “If obstacles to accelerated mitigation are rooted in underlying structural features of society, then transforming such structures can support emission reductions.” The report frames this in terms of overall development as well as in terms of a “just transition.” Once more, making such changes in line with the sustainable development goals appears.

This section also sees mitigation in the 2020s being so low that things will have to ramp up very much from 2030-2050.  It also offers several different ways we might attempt that, or Illustrative Mitigation Pathways (IMPs):

heavy reliance on renewables (IMP–Ren), strong emphasis on low demand for energy (IMP–LD), extensive use of Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) in the energy and the industry sectors to achieve net negative emissions (IMP–Neg), mitigation in the context of broader sustainable development and shifting development pathways (IMP–SP), and the implications of a less rapid and gradual strengthening of near–term mitigation actions (IMP–GS).

Here the report makes a noteworthy call for humanity to implement some form of carbon capture. There’s a specific list of techniques: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), afforestation, and direct air capture with storage.  This section concludes by noting the many benefits humanity can realize by adopting an aggressive mitigation strategy in the short term, including improved health and eventual economic progress.

5: Mitigation Responses in Sectors and Systems

This section – the largest in the report – examines ways different sectors can mitigate the crisis.

Energy: begins with a call for “rapid and deep reductions in energy system CO2 and GHG emissions,” which will likely lead to “stranded assets,” fossil fuel reserves and infrastructure left to economic loss.  In contrast, the renewable energy world represents a massive economic opportunity.  A whole series of technological developments appear, including hydrogen power and improved batteries.

Urban and other settlements: most of humanity now lives in cities, with their numbers and footprint likely to grow through 2050. Therefore urban planning and design needs to address global warming thoroughly, dealing with infrastructure (new and legacy), extreme weather, carbon capture, transportation, and informal populations.  Governance is both complex and key.

Transport: this section calls for more “electromobility” (electric cars plus scooters etc.) and further research and development into biofuels, synthetic fuels, hydrogen, and more.  There is also praise for “[c]hanges in urban form, behaviour programs, the circular economy, the shared economy, and digitalisation trends.”  At the same time there are issues around governance, labor rights, and mining impacts.

Buildings: the report reminds us that buildings contribute greenhouse gases through their construction and operation. To stop this, the document calls for a variety of design measures, from maximizing space use to circular use of materials.  Retrofitting buildings is also a good idea.

Industry: extraction and manufacturing business has grown since 2000, and so have its GHG emissions.  Plastic production – deeply reliant on fossil fuels – has also grown.  The report calls for increased energy efficiency, “circular material flows” (re-use and re-purpose of stuff), switching industrial production to electrical power sources, using materials which don’t emit carbon in their production, capturing carbon leakage, embracing new technologies, and more.

Agriculture, forestry and other land use (AFOLU): this domain contributed significantly to global warming, “account[ing] for 13–21% of global total anthropogenic GHG16
emissions in the period 2010–2019.”  Hence calls for ending forest reduction, for growing more trees, producing more alternative foods (plant-based “meat,” insects, algae, bivalves), and for changing human diets to ones “high in plant protein and low in meat and dairy.”

Each of these can interact with the others.  For example, “Wind and solar power can coexist with agriculture in beneficial ways.”

This section also calls for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through various means, although in very hedged ways. There’s a range listed here, from seeding oceans to expanded forestry to bichar and emerging technologies.  There are many open questions, from how to store captured CO2 to energy inputs.

6: Implementation and Enabling Conditions

That potentially cryptic header refers to “behaviour and lifestyle, policy, governance and institutional capacity, international cooperation, finance, and innovation and technology can accelerate mitigation in the context of sustainable development.”  So this section is how to get people and systems changing.

It includes tactful calls for laws to drive social change along direct (banning CO2 production) and indirect (altering people’s behavior) lines, as well as repeated calls for expanded and improved governance.  There are also recommendations for cities, media enterprises, lawyers, and businesses (especially for carbon pricing and taking subsidies). Overarching is a plea for integrated decision-making, which is understandable, given the problem’s scope and complexity.

This is just one cut through a few parts of the governance problem.

There are many more enabling conditions and barriers in play. Financing these changes remains below what’s needed.  Intellectual property rights might or might not help.

Technologies may arrive which disrupt these plans.
 

7: Mitigation in the Context of Sustainable Development

Looking at climate change from a justice perspective also means placing the emphasis on: i) the protection of vulnerable populations from the impacts of climate change, ii) mitigating the effects of low–carbon transformations, and iii) ensuring an equitable decarbonised world…

The IPCC calls for all of the above to be done justly and equitably. They use the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals as a way of framing such action.  Actions, rather, and these actions can cut across different directions.  For example, some policies can help SDG and climate goals reinforce each other, while others involve trade-offs between them.  The trick is to mount a wide range of actions – a portfolio – and watch for the connections between them, SGDs, and climate strategy.

What might this mean for higher education?

There are very few direct references to education at all, much less to colleges and universities.  Mostly education appears as part of the SDGs, where the document supports expanded access to and better quality of schooling.

At one point a call appears to “use education and information instruments to shift behaviour,” but this is confined to “(media campaigns, websites).”  More ambitious is this idea for changing schooling as a whole:

Changing from a commercialised, individualised, entrepreneurial training model to an education cognizant of planetary health and human well-being can accelerate
climate change awareness and action.

There we see education (as a whole, presumably including academia) transformed and at the same time transforming society. That’s a bold and enormously ambitious vision.

Beyond that call, we can identify connections between different parts of universities and what the report argues for.  Changing up the physical environment of a campus, for example, ties into changes to nearly every mitigation domain: buildings, cities (urban institutions), transport, and energy.  Implementation and enabling conditions are, first, terrific subjects for research. Second, they provide opportunities for academia-community connections. Third, they leave open opportunities for academics to seek to influence the world, using their intellectual capital.

…and that concludes our run-through. I might post a summary with more reflections, if there’s interest.

*”More than 2000 quantitative emissions pathways were submitted to the AR6 scenarios database“!!

What impacts will climate change have on the future?  What do they mean for higher education?

Today we continue our group reading of the new IPCC report, focusing on the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability document produced by Working Group III.  We’ll dive into the “Summary for Policymakers.”

We’ll begin with a summary of the high points, then outline some first implications for higher education, and conclude with questions.

(For more info on this reading, click here. To look back at the previous installments of this series, click here and here.)

This report is broken into four main sections, after an introduction.

Section B: Recent developments and current trends
The biggest trend this report identifies is unsurprising, that greenhouse gas emissions have been rising, including during the 21st century. There have been some positive developments, which slowed the rate of growth, but: “Emissions reductions in CO 2 from fossil fuels and industrial processes, due to improvements in energy intensity of GDP and carbon intensity of energy, have been less than emissions increases from rising global activity levels in industry, energy supply, transport, agriculture and buildings.”  Overall, it seems likely we’ll overshoot a 1.5 degree rise by mid-century or earlier.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions vary widely around the world. One key bit: “The 10% of households with the highest per capita emissions contribute a disproportionately large share of global household GHG emissions.”

Some low emission tech has gotten cheaper. Digitization (shifting analog experiences online) might help, “but can have adverse side-effects unless appropriately governed.”

Section C, System transformations to limit global warming
This starts off with a stark warning: “GHG emissions are projected to rise beyond 2025, leading to a median global warming of 3.2 [2.2 to 3.5] °C by 2100… (medium confidence).”  Stopping that would take “rapid and deep and in most cases immediate GHG emission reductions in all sectors.”  The section details a range of changes: reducing fossil fuel burning, switching to renewables, changing construction materials, exploring hydrogen and other new fuels, sucking down and storing carbon in cities, retrofitting buildings, expanding forests, and switching diets to contain more plants.  Accomplishing this will include “socio-cultural and behavioural change,” which might be encouraged by “Choice architecture,” or “the presentation of choices to consumers, and the impact that presentation has on consumer decision-making.”

I mentioned sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere. The IPCC is adamant about the importance of this: “The deployment of CDR [carbon dioxide removal] to counterbalance hard-to-abate residual emissions is unavoidable if net zero CO2 or GHG emissions are to be achieved. ”

Section D: Linkages between mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development.
Can climate change mitigation work with the United Nation’s sustainable development goals? The IPCC thinks so, if we handle the policies properly.

  That includes being attuned to inequalities and not punishing the marginalized.  Doing this the right way might build positive momentum: “Attention to equity and broad and meaningful participation of all relevant actors in decision-making at all scales can build social trust, and deepen and widen support for transformative changes.”

Here is one sample of the sheer range and complexity of the decision-making this report anticipates:

Section E: Strengthening the response

This is the strategy section, outlining how mitigation might succeed.

The text frames this in terms of two opposed forces:

‘enabling conditions’ refers to conditions that enhance the feasibility of adaptation and mitigation options. Enabling conditions include finance, technological innovation, strengthening policy instruments, institutional capacity, multi-level governance and changes in human behaviour and lifestyles…

Barriers to feasibility would need to be reduced or removed, and enabling conditions strengthened to deploy mitigation options at scale. These barriers and enablers include geophysical, environmental-ecological, technological, and economic factors, and especially institutional and socio-cultural factors.

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For example, “There is sufficient global capital and liquidity to close global investment gaps, given the size of the global financial system [enabling conditions], but there are barriers to redirect capital to climate action both within and outside the global financial sector, and in the macroeconomic headwinds facing developing regions. ”

Getting this done requires good climate governance, which seems to be massively democratic in involving all kinds of stakeholders, especially the marginalized.

What does this mean for higher education?

This document addresses academia and education directly less strongly than previous bits of the IPCC report.  The word “education” only appears twice, once as part of decent living standards (i.e., the world should mitigate climate change so as to allow people access to learning) and another time as an instance of “[e]conomy-wide packages that support mitigation and avoid negative environmental outcomes.”  There are also calls for research, unsurprisingly, but the report does not identify whom the researchers might be.

To be honest, this surprised me. Perhaps colleges and universities need to do more to demonstrate their capacity to address climate change mitigation.

Questions

1. Does the community around you believe in the urgency to act that this document shares?
2. Do you think global and just climate governance is possible?
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     What might it look like?

3. What roles might academia play in mitigation?
4. And what else do you think about this document?

Next week: on to the technical summary.

What impacts will climate change have on the future?  What do they mean for higher education?

Today we continue our group reading of the new IPCC report, focusing on the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability document produced by Working Group II.  We’ll dive into the “Technical Summary.”

We’ll begin with a summary of the high points, then shift to questions.

(For more info on this reading, click here. To look back at the previous installments of this series, click here and here.)

This report is broken into five sections.

Section A: Introduction
This offers some parameters and formal explanations. For example, there’s a handy vocabulary list, along with an explanation of how the text qualifies many assertions by variable confidence levels.

• It also notes some changes since the last report, AR5, such as:
• Risks and solutions
• Emphases on social justice, equity and different forms of expertise have emerged.
• A call for social transformation: “The current coupled human and natural system is insufficiently resilient and does not meet societal goals of equity, well-being, and ecosystem health. Meeting the objectives of the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals, and other policy statements requires society and the biosphere to move to a new and more resilient state”

Section B: Observed impacts and adaptation
This part begins by outlining the many ways the climate crisis is already impacting humanity. These include: changes to ecosystems; extreme weather damage to humans, plants, and animals; harm to food and forest systems; problems of too little water (aridity, water insecurity) and too much (excessive and/or unpredictable precipitation); harm to human physical and mental health; involuntary migration.

Next appear a list of vulnerabilities, including estimates of the populations at high risk (3.3 billion) and low (1.8). Among the former indigenous people are especially at risk. The report goes on to map out risks by intersecting identities:

The intersection of gender with race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, Indigenous identity, age, disability, income, migrant status, and geographical location often compound vulnerability to climate change impacts (very high confidence), exacerbate inequity and create further injustice (high confidence).

Coastal population clusters are especially threatened by sea level changes. Economies are at risk of disruption and damage, yet “[c]limate impacts and projected risks have been insufficiently internalized into private and public sector planning and budgeting practices and adaptation finance (medium confidence).”

Section C: Projected impacts and risks
This is the core of the report, in my estimation. It expands on section B’s threats and vulnerabilities in much more detail. Here I want to identify some of the leading ones, but invite readers to explore on their own:

• species extinction
• damages to natural CO2 sinks
• rising food insecurity
• increasing human problems from changes to water systems
• ” number and scope of diseases
• more details on migration: “Under all global warming levels, some regions that are presently densely populated will become unsafe or uninhabitable with movement from these regions occurring autonomously or through planned relocation (high confidence).”
• rising numbers of people living in poverty
• growing chances for civil war and interstate fighting
• economic damages increase in a nonlinear way with temperature increases
• some developments collide and produce new risks

Some areas appear for special attention:
-geography:

Asian and African urban areas are considered high risk locations from projected climate, extreme events, unplanned urbanisation, and rapid land use change (high confidence)” and “Arctic communities and Indigenous Peoples face risks to economic activities (very high confidence) as direct and cascading impacts of climate change continue to occur at a magnitude and pace unprecedented in recent history, and much faster than projected for other regions (very high confidence)

-unequal damage: “Non-market, non-economic damages and adverse impacts on livelihoods will be concentrated in regions and populations that are already more vulnerable (high confidence).”

This section of the report touched on geoengineering, raising it as a possible but challenging option.

Section D: Contribution of adaptation to solutions
How can humans respond to the crisis? This section begins by looking into our first responses:

• some animal, plant, and human adaptation is under way, but many are hitting limits
• human *maladaptation* is occurring. To explain: “inappropriate responses to climate change create long-term lock-in of vulnerability, exposure, and risks that are difficult and costly to change (very high confidence) and exacerbate existing inequalities for Indigenous Peoples and vulnerable groups, impeding achievement of SDGs, increasing adaptation needs, and shrinking the solution space (high confidence).”
• human responses are starting to happen, but are too incremental and poorly funded
• “Decision-support tools and decision-analytic methods are available and are being applied for climate adaptation and climate risk management in different contexts (high confidence).”

Looking ahead:

• conservation planning needs to be scaled up and integrated into everything else.
  -mitigation and adaptation are both essential. One shouldn’t substitute for the other. Doing both won’t be easy – “Competition, trade-offs and conflict between mitigation and adaptation priorities will increase with climate change impacts (high confidence).”
• nature based responses can be good, but require a lot of supporting work to succeed.
• solutions need to address inequalities. “Integrated multisectoral strategies that address social inequities (e.g., gender, ethnicity) and social protection of low-income groups will increase effectiveness of adaptation responses for water and food security (high confidence)”
• solutions should also be diverse and varied, depending on local circumstances: “Adaptation pathways break adaptation planning into manageable steps based on near-term, low-regret actions and aligning adaptation choices with societal goals that account for changing risk, interests and values, uncertain futures and the long-term adaptation commitment to sea-level rise (high confidence). In charting adaptation pathways, reconciling divergent interests and values is a priority (high confidence).
• changing societies to meet the crisis may generate additional ways to respond:”Deep-rooted transformational adaptation opens new options for adapting to the impacts and risks of climate change (high confidence) by changing the fundamental attributes of a system including altered goals or values and addressing root causes of vulnerability.”

Section E: Climate Resilient Development

Right now, humanity isn’t trending in the right direction.  Instead,the IPCC sees

[g]lobal trends including rising income inequality, urbanisation, migration, continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions, land use change, human displacement, and reversals of long-term trends toward increased life expectancy run counter to the SDGs as well as efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a changing climate.

Major areas to focus on: “energy, industry, urban and infrastructure, land and ecosystems, and societal” systems.  This means not just working with science, but also “the role of non-climate policies, social norms, lifestyles, power relationships and worldviews in
enabling climate action and sustainable development.”

These are not only steps which avert catastrophe, but are also good for humanity:

Climate action and sustainable development are interdependent. Pursued in an inclusive and integrated manner, they enhance human and ecological well-being. Sustainable development is fundamental to capacity for climate action, including reductions in greenhouse gas emissions as well as enhancing social and ecological resilience to climate change. Increasing social and gender equity is an integral part of the technological and social transitions and transformation toward climate resilient development. Such transitions in societal systems reduce poverty and enable greater equity and agency in decision-making. They often require rights-based approaches to protect the livelihoods, priorities and survival of marginalised groups including Indigenous peoples, women, ethnic minorities and children. (high confidence)

What does this mean for higher education?

This document seems to call academia to act, as we noted last week.  There are several points which hail education directly, such as TS.D.6.5, which urges us to pursue “[s]ocial policy innovations include social safety nets,inclusive approaches to disaster risk reduction and the integration of climate adaptation into education.” (emphases added) I read that as a full spectrum integration, including teaching, research, and institutional operations.

TS.D.10.6 develops the curricular aspect a bit further, advocating for “climate change literacy.”   Listen to how that’s outlined:

Ways to enhance climate literacy and foster behavioural change include access to education and information, programmes using the performing and visual arts, storytelling, training workshops, participatory 3-dimensional modelling, climate services, and community-based monitoring.

On the one hand we could see this as a series of teaching methods available to a range of actors, such as governments and nonprofits. On the other, we can read this as not only a call for a curriculum, but for certain pedagogies.

Education can also play a role in mobilizing people to act.  From TS.E.2.1: “Conditions enabling rapid increases and innovative climate responses include experience of
extreme events or climate education influencing perceptions of urgency…”

Questions

1. Do people see climate action in such a positive light?  Or do we see it as something painful, like medicine for an illness?
2. What would a climate literacy effort look like? That is, would it be something infused through a curriculum, or based in certain classes, or housed in an interdisciplinary center?
3. What is maladaptation in higher education?
4. And what else do you think about this document?

Next week: on to Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change.