Summing it all up!

Well this is my final post as part of my masters degree. I've found this much more enjoyable than I had originally thought and thank you to everyone who went through this journey with me!

I thought it would be fitting to end by summing some of the things I've learnt over the course of this blog.

Moving beyond the 2 °C target

Attempts to drive mitigation through global target setting and strict numerical targets may have been useful focal points for policy, but have ultimately have achieved very little. Not only is it impossible to quantify dangerous climate change using a single metric, but ultimately the past few decades have shown that ‘abstract long-term targets usually don’t catalyse tangible short-term action’ (Geden and Beck, 2014).

There is a need to move beyond the target itself and the approach generally, even with the immediate and unavoidable deterioration of the climate science community’s reputation.

A bottom-up approach:

The question we therefore need to ask is, what next? What about a bottom-up approach:

"Rather than loading more and more issues onto the climate mitigation agenda, we should, as far as possible, divide climate into a series of more tractable problems (Rayner, 2011).

As difficult as it is to imagine, I do think we need to re-envision mitigation. If we continue to see it as a global problem which is only solvable through a global effort then it seems we will endlessly be waiting...

Strangely enough, I think a quotation from a video game sums it up perfectly:

‘Insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over again expecting (something) to change’ (edited slightly to keep this blog PG friendly (sourced from Far Cry 3)

The UNFCCC is now 20 years old, and this year will convene in Paris to once again discuss how best to deal with Climate Change. Yet, as Grubb (2014) points out, as the world and the issue itself has changed dramatically in the passing years, the UNFCCC has remained largely consistent in its approach. For a bottom-up approach to be successful, it needs to be supported by an international regime that ‘helps countries achieve progress domestically’ (Dai, 2010) and the UN’s approach is historically lacking in this respect.

The UN’s obsession with multilaeralism, fundamentally fails to address the divisions that occur on a national level (Prins et al., 2010)

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So then looking back on the aims I had with this blog I think I've taken a step in the right direction.

Am I still sceptical that we will be able to achieve a stabilisation scenario? The simple answer is yes. I think my blog has highlighted just how complex the issue is and the inadequacies in the present approach to climate change mitigation. But on a positive note, it has also established that there are solutions available! It looks like I’ve gained something from my scepticism then (and hopefully so have you).

Thanks again for reading my posts (and putting up with my poor taste in cartoons, YouTube videos and movies). Here’s hoping we can make a stabilisation scenario a reality!