TY - JOUR
T1 - A well-timed shift from local to global agreements accelerates climate change mitigation
AU - Karatayev, Vadim A.
AU - Vasconcelos, Vítor V.
AU - Lafuite, Anne Sophie
AU - Levin, Simon A.
AU - Bauch, Chris T.
AU - Anand, Madhur
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the UC Davis FARM cluster for computing resources. This research was supported by a New Frontiers in Research Fund Exploration Grant of the Government of Canada (to M.A. and C.T.B.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s).
PY - 2021/12/1
Y1 - 2021/12/1
N2 - Recent attempts at cooperating on climate change mitigation highlight the limited efficacy of large-scale negotiations, when commitment to mitigation is costly and initially rare. Deepening existing voluntary mitigation pledges could require more stringent, legally-binding agreements that currently remain untenable at the global scale. Building-blocks approaches promise greater success by localizing agreements to regions or few-nation summits, but risk slowing mitigation adoption globally. Here, we show that a well-timed policy shift from local to global legally-binding agreements can dramatically accelerate mitigation compared to using only local, only global, or both agreement types simultaneously. This highlights the scale-specific roles of mitigation incentives: local agreements promote and sustain mitigation commitments in early-adopting groups, after which global agreements rapidly draw in late-adopting groups. We conclude that focusing negotiations on local legally-binding agreements and, as these become common, a renewed pursuit of stringent, legally-binding world-wide agreements could best overcome many current challenges facing climate mitigation.
AB - Recent attempts at cooperating on climate change mitigation highlight the limited efficacy of large-scale negotiations, when commitment to mitigation is costly and initially rare. Deepening existing voluntary mitigation pledges could require more stringent, legally-binding agreements that currently remain untenable at the global scale. Building-blocks approaches promise greater success by localizing agreements to regions or few-nation summits, but risk slowing mitigation adoption globally. Here, we show that a well-timed policy shift from local to global legally-binding agreements can dramatically accelerate mitigation compared to using only local, only global, or both agreement types simultaneously. This highlights the scale-specific roles of mitigation incentives: local agreements promote and sustain mitigation commitments in early-adopting groups, after which global agreements rapidly draw in late-adopting groups. We conclude that focusing negotiations on local legally-binding agreements and, as these become common, a renewed pursuit of stringent, legally-binding world-wide agreements could best overcome many current challenges facing climate mitigation.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-021-23056-5
DO - 10.1038/s41467-021-23056-5
M3 - Article
C2 - 34006840
AN - SCOPUS:85106065324
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 12
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 2908
ER -