Human Dimensions of Climate Change

Paul C. Stern, National Research Council, USA

Keynote Talk

Cooling the Liberal Arts:Workshop for Teaching Climate Change

Dickinson CollegeCarlisle, PA

January 10, 2014

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What are the human dimensions?Figure from National Research Council (1992),

Global Environmental Change: Understanding the Human Dimensions, (elaborating on a figure from Clark, 1988)

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Implications of this perspective

• The physical and social sciences are connected, and all are needed to understand and deal with climate change

• The quintessential issues are at the intersection of the physical, biological, technological, and social

• I will focus on the bottom half of the diagram, but both halves are essentiala) The human causes of climate change, and what drives themb) The human effects of climate changec) Human understanding of climate changed) Options for action to address a, b, and c

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A few foci to stimulate conversation

1. Improving fundamental ability to understand climate change and think about its implications

2. “Attribution” of climate change to human causes as a focus for education

3. Policy analysis of realistic options for limiting and adapting to climate change

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1. Improving the fundamental ability to understand the challenges of climate change

• Teaching climate change includes teaching the current state of relevant knowledge in the natural and social sciences and other relevant fields

• It is also offers an excellent opportunity for more fundamental kinds of education, about:– Climate change as intrinsically hard to understand

(Weber and Stern, 2011); intersection of statistics and psychology

– Thinking and managing under risk and uncertainty • how to make informed choices about an uncertain future• how to evaluate knowledge claims, especially contested ones

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Climate change as a hard-to-understand phenomenon: physical aspects

• Causes are invisible• Impacts are geographically and temporally distant• Signals are hard to detect– Slow changes in averages of highly variable phenomena

(temperature, rainfall, etc.)– Climate change affects multiple phenomena, but people

tend to focus on one at a time

• Climate history is an increasingly poor guide to the future (non-linear change)

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Climate change as a hard-to-understand phenomenon: psychological/social aspects

• Challenge of recognizing and understanding change in highly variable phenomena, and its implications

• Personal experience is powerful but misleading• Hard to see changes in averages of variable phenomena• Recent extreme events carry extra weight• Emotional reactions to uncertainty

• Limits of simple mental models• Conflating climate change with other environmental problems

• Cognition driven by affect, values, worldviews• Climate change: an emerging attitude object (Stern et al., 1995)• Dimensions of risk perception: familiarity and dread

• The climate change denial campaign

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Climate change as a case example for thinking about risk and acting under uncertainty

• Popular presentations of climate change offer “facts” and disputes about the “facts”– This can lead some to accept one view as “established”– …and others to conclude that nothing is really known and that this

justifies postponing action– Both positions are too unsophisticated– Standards of evidence for risk management decisions

• We actually have data, projections, and risk estimates• Knowledge is better about the past than about the future,

but in both cases, there are:– Ways to assess knowledge claims– Ways to systematically consider options under risk

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A liberal arts approach to decisions under risk, uncertainty, and evolving knowledge (1)

1. Science provides a set of social institutions for validating knowledge claimsa. Characteristics of institutions that foster strong and

improving science --(e.g., openness, independent peer review, protections against

conflicts of interest, etc.)

b. Characteristics of institutions that develop and improve decision-relevant (practical) environmental knowledge --(e.g., broad-based deliberation, explicit attention to value

issues, transparent deliberative processes, acceptable rules for closure and reconsideration; NRC, 1996; Stern, 2005)

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A liberal arts approach to decisions under risk, uncertainty, and evolving knowledge (2)

2. Society offers institutions for governing risks and managing uncertainty (regulation, insurance, etc.)Characteristics of effective governance institutions (Stern,

2013):• invest in science• ensure broad participation• integrate scientific analysis with deliberation• higher-level actors facilitate actions at lower levels• connect a variety of institutional forms (polyarchy)• independent monitoring, accountable to interested and

affected parties• plan for institutional adaptation and change

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2. Attribution of Climate Change to Human Causes

• Driving forces human activities physical changes planetary radiative balance– Radiative balance (physical changes “forced” by GHG

emissions, changes in albedo, etc.); must be understood but not a focus of “human dimensions” studies

– Human activities that directly cause (“drive”) physical changes (e.g., fossil energy use, deforestation and other land cover changes, cement production)

– Driving forces of the human activities: the I=PAT equation and “unpacking” it: which populations and technologies,; which uses of money; which governance systems, etc. (York et al., 2003)

– Drivers operate at different scales– Different disciplines needed for different drivers and scales

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“Attributing” GHG emissions to human activities: Some issues for the liberal arts

• Implications of a focus on activities (driving cars) vs. driving forces (income levels, automotive technology, CAFE standards and other government actions): different questions; different disciplines

• Implications of choosing scale of analysis (global, national, organizational, individual/household): different disciplines

• Accounting by consumers vs. by producers– IPCC examines CO2-eq emissions by country where emissions occur– Consumer-based accounting can also be done happen at smaller levels

(cities, firms, households)– New estimates attribute emissions to producers of fossil fuels, cement,

etc. (Heede, 2014)• Attribution as accounting (subdivide emissions by activities,

emitters, etc.) vs. attributing ethical/moral responsibility

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A producer-based accounting of emissions: Heede (2014)

• Paper estimates CO2eq for producers of fossil fuels and cement, 1854-2010

• Finds that the top 90 producers account for 63% of cumulative worldwide emissions; top 10 account for 38%

• Top 10 cumulative emitters:– Former Soviet Union (8.9%); China (8.6%), Chevron/Texaco (3.5%),

ExxonMobil (3.2%), Aramco (3.2%), BP (2.5%), Gazprom (2.2%), Shell (2.1%), National Iranian Oil Company (2.0%), Poland (coal; 1.9%)

• Top 10 emitters for 2010 are different:– Aramco, Gazprom, National Iranian Oil Company, Coal India,

Exxon/Mobil, PetroChina, Pemex, BP, Peabody Energy, Petroleos de Venezuela

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Issues raised by producer-based accounting• What different policy options for mitigation are suggested by allocating

responsibility to producers vs. to consumers?– IPCC approach suggests international treaties– Consumer-based analyses suggest policies to reduce consumption at all levels– Heede's approach opens possibilities for intervention by stockholders or

focused on corporate managers– State-owned entities may be the worst emitters now

• Which policy strategies have the greatest practical potential?• What analyses would be needed to inform policy choices focused on

changing behavior of major private-sector and state-run corporate emitters?• How could emitters’ investments in CCS, renewable energy technologies,

etc., be credited against current and past emissions in order to recalculate net emissions levels?

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Attribution as accounting vs. as ethics• Each accounting system implicitly assigns (moral?)

responsibility to whatever is counted, e.g.,– To producers or to consumers– To countries, regions, organizations, households

• The problem is multiplied when impacts are also considered– Responsibility for impacts could be allocated to producers

or consumers of fossil fuels etc., to those who get in harm’s way, and/or to those who allow or encourage them to be or build there

• A topic for philosophy and for policy analysis

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3. Policy Analysis of Realistic Options

Mitigation: Analysis of options to limit climate change

Adaptation: Analysis of options to increase the resilience of communities and other human systems to the effects of un-avoided climate change

Possibilities to focus on concrete policy issues

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Mitigation: Enhancing our legacy for the long-term future

• My 50th Reunion at Amherst College as a case– Concern with our generation’s legacy– “The world we inherited and the world we will leave behind”:

Three conversations (education, environment, and government)

• Climate change as the preeminent environmental legacy issue– What are the most promising ways to improve our legacy?– Focus on mitigation over adaptation because of greater legacy

implications– Looking for a “sweet spot”

• I x p: Multiplying the impact of an action and the probability that we can make it happen

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A possible sweet spot for colleges: Divestment

• Divestment has been proposed at many colleges, usually by students, sometimes by faculty (sometimes focused on coal, sometimes all fossil fuel companies)

• Trustees usually have questions– Would it have any effect (e.g., is it similar to/different from past

divestment campaigns, such as in South Africa)?– What would it cost the college’s endowment?– How would we decide which firms to divest?– Could a historically fossil fuel company get credit for doing better, e.g.,

by investing in renewable energy? If so, how?– How could a company get off a divestment list?

• Students could seek answers to these questions– My alumni group will seek to collaborate with faculty, students– Need to look for other possible sweet spots

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Adaptation: Reducing impacts of climate change on what people value

• Potential impacts are a major motivator for action on climate change (on mitigation and adaptation)

• They are also a major subject for analysis and for policy (e.g., what can be done to reduce damage from expectable future events)

• Resilience also a major subject for analysis– Can be examined by locations, social systems, and in relation to

economic/social stratification– Issues of definition (e.g., resilience when; time discounting)

• Much room for impact and resilience analysis in liberal arts curricula

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Selected referencesHeede, R. 2014. Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to

fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854–2010. Climatic Change 122:229-241.National Research Council, 1992. Global Environmental Change: Understanding the

Human Dimensions. Washington: National Academy Press.National Research Council, 1996. Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a

Democratic Society. Washington: National Academy Press.Stern, P.C. 2005. Deliberative methods for understanding environmental systems.

BioScience, 55:976-982.Stern, P.C. 2013. Design principles for governing risks of emerging technologies. Pp.

65-87 in Structural Human Ecology: Risk, Energy and Sustainability, Dietz, T. and Jorgenson, A.K. eds. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press.

Stern, P.C., Dietz, T., Kalof, L., and Guagnano, G.A. 1995. Values, beliefs, and proenvironmental action: attitude formation toward emergent attitude objects. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25:1611-1636.

Stern, P.C., and Kalof, L. 1996. Evaluating Social Science Research (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Weber, E.U., and Stern, P.C. 2011. Public understanding of climate change in the United States. American Psychologist 66:315-328.

York, R., Rosa, E.A., and Dietz, T. 2003. Footprints on the Earth: The environmental consequences of modernity. American Sociological Review 68:279-300.