Search results

Purpose: This chapter discusses the need for climate change risk mitigation and why it is not the responsibility of Central Banks to mitigate climate change risk.

Methodology: This chapter uses critical discourse analysis to explain why central banks should not have the responsibility for climate change risk mitigation.

Findings: This chapter argues that the responsibility for managing climate change risk should lie with elected officials, other groups and institutions but not Central Banks. Elected officials, or politicians, should be held responsible to deal with the consequence of climate change events. Also, international organizations and everybody can take responsibility for climate change while the Central Bank can provide assistance – but Central Banks should not lead the climate policy making or mitigation agenda.

Implication: The policy implication is that the responsibility for climate change risk mitigation should be shifted to politicians who are elected officials of the people. Also, international climate change organizations or groups can take responsibility for mitigating the climate change risk of member countries. Finally, citizens in a country or region should have equal responsibility for climate change. Climate information should be provided to every citizen to help them prepare for future climatic conditions.

Originality: This chapter propagates the idea that Central Banks should take a lead role in dealing with the problems of climate change. This chapter is the first chapter to contest a Central Bank-led climate change risk mitigation agenda.

This chapter explores the reciprocal dynamics between climate change and tourism, underlining the imperative to comprehend this connection for effective mitigation strategies and sustainable practices. It focuses on two contrasting regions, the Mediterranean and Himalayan, elucidating their geographical and economic disparities. The Mediterranean, known for its coastal and marine attractions, faces high vulnerability to climate change, impacting outdoor recreation and tourism activities. This region experiences a Mediterranean climate characterised by distinct seasonal patterns, but it also grapples with high-impact atmospheric events like floods and droughts, while the Himalayan region is experiencing more untimely rain and snowfall, erratic monsoons, and decreased snowfall. These climatic challenges, coupled with a growing population and dependence on imported resources, necessitate adaptation strategies for the agricultural and food production sectors. This chapter evaluates climate anomalies and impacts in both the Indian Himalayan and the Adriatic region, with a particular focus on the tourism industry’s adaptation and mitigation capacities.

In addition to vulnerabilities resulting from climate change, it also analysed existing measures and documents related to climate change, as well as their effectiveness based on the expert opinion of the focus groups. The findings reveal that both regions experience shared and region-specific climate change impacts, affecting agriculture, water resources, human health, and infrastructure. Further research opportunities are identified, including the study of ecosystem resilience, biodiversity preservation, sustainable water resource management, and long-term public health implications of changing climatic conditions. This chapter underscores the urgency of climate action and the imperative for adaptive strategies in a complex and uncertain landscape.

Climate control needs have reached momentum. While scientists call for stabilizing climate and regulators structure climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts around the globe, economists are concerned with finding proper and fair financing mechanisms. In an overlapping-generations framework, Sachs (2014) solves the climate change predicament that seems to pit today’s against future generations. Sachs (2014) proposes that the current generation mitigates climate change financed through bonds to remain financially as well-off as without mitigation while improving environmental well-being of future generations through ensured climate stability. This intergenerational tax-and-transfer policy turns climate change mitigation into a Pareto improving strategy. Sachs’ (2014) discrete model is integrated in contemporary growth and resource theories. The following article analyzes how climate bonds can be phased-in, in a model for a socially optimal solution and a laissez-faire economy. Optimal trajectories are derived partially analytically (e.g., by using the Pontryagin maximum principle to define the optimal equilibrium), partially data driven (e.g., by the use of modern big market data), and partially by using novel cutting-edge methods – for example, nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC), which solves complex dynamic optimization problems with different nonlinearities for infinite and finite decision horizons. NMPC will be programed with terminal condition in order to determine appropriate numeric solutions converging to some optimal equilibria. The analysis tests if the climate change debt adjusted growth model stays within the bounds of a sustainable fiscal policy by employing NMPC, which solves complex dynamic systems with different nonlinearities.

Climate change poses a significant challenge for the tourism industry and is a further inhibitor to the sustainable development objectives of tourism destinations. Recognizing the importance of these issues in 2011 and drawing together a number of the leading works in the field, this chapter provides a contextual background to climate change and tourism, debates the implications for the industry and issues such as adaptation, mitigation, and poverty alleviation. The discussion concludes with recommendations for governance and policy, adaptation and mitigation, and knowledge management, research, and education.

Fairness is central to any multilateral regime, that is, any agreement between multiple nation-states to address and resolve a common problem. Climate change mitigation is among the key global environmental concerns that will require a common agenda, approach, and set of actions by the community of nations. To that end, global climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 1992) are centered on establishing a multilateral framework to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from all nations and to help those who would be affected by climate change.

Due to the more pressing need, the majority of material in this book has dealt with mitigation; interventions to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (IPCC, 2001) away from a scenario of ‘business as usual’. An early academic review on climate change mitigation and transport appeared in 2007 (Chapman, 2007), a year before the United Kingdom committed itself to the highly ambitious Climate Change Act 2008. The final act sought an ambitious 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Although criticised in this book as being unrealistic, this is the level of intervention required if ‘dangerous’ climate change is to be avoided (defined as greater than 2°C rise in global temperatures). As Chapter 8 (a policy perspective) explains, such targets, however unrealistic, are informed by considerable input from expert opinion (e.g. Delphi studies) and require a detailed knowledge of current emissions as well as accurate predictions/scenarios of future emissions. For this reason, scenarios and the control of uncertainty were discussed in Chapter 2 towards the start of this book. Indeed, the commonly quoted ‘business as usual’ scenario is in itself too simplistic and highly improbable, not only due to mitigation measures imposed by governments, but also because of the future scarcity of oil which will force change in the medium term regardless. Backcasting is the key tool used to model the continuum of socio-economic scenarios which exist between ‘business as usual’ and the equally unlikely case of all targets being met. However, the science is inherently difficult and the end result is a wide range of permutations and storylines, largely dependent on mitigation. Early progress towards the 80% target has not been promising, but the decarbonisation of the transport sector is still seen as key in meeting the demands of the Climate Change Act 2008. There is a need to tackle the three primary culprits of greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector: aviation, freight and car ownership (Chapman, 2007). This book has examined in detail how this could be achieved in all these sectors using a range of aspects relating to technological and behavioural change.

In this chapter I claim that climate change poses important questions of global justice, both about mitigating the change that is now under way and about adapting to its consequences.¹ I argue for a mixed policy of mitigation and adaptation, and defend one particular approach to mitigation. I also claim that those of us who are rich by global standards and benefit from excess emissions have strenuous duties in our roles as citizens, consumers, producers, and so on to reduce our emissions and to finance adaptation.

Anyone who follows climate change policy debates even casually knows that these debates are shot through with controversy about what ought to be done and who ought to be doing it. What sometimes get lost in these debates, however, are much deeper differences over the nature of the climate change problem itself. That is my focus in this chapter. I will take climate change as a prime example of broader debates over what constitutes “sustainable development” and draw upon different strands of the sustainability literature to show how these disagreements play out in the climate change context.