research paper on climate change

The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature

This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought. We exploit natural variability in global temperature and rely on time-series variation. A 1°C increase in global temperature leads to a 12% decline in world GDP. Global temperature shocks correlate much more strongly with extreme climatic events than the country-level temperature shocks commonly used in the panel literature, explaining why our estimate is substantially larger. We use our reduced-form evidence to estimate structural damage functions in a standard neoclassical growth model. Our results imply a Social Cost of Carbon of $1,056 per ton of carbon dioxide. A business-as-usual warming scenario leads to a present value welfare loss of 31%. Both are multiple orders of magnitude above previous estimates and imply that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.

Adrien Bilal gratefully acknowledges support from the Chae Family Economics Research Fund at Harvard University. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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A review of the global climate change impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures

Kashif abbass.

1 School of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim

2 Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Chemical Pollution Control and Resources Reuse, School of Environmental and Biological Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Xiaolingwei 200, Nanjing, 210094 People’s Republic of China

Huaming Song

Muntasir murshed.

3 School of Business and Economics, North South University, Dhaka, 1229 Bangladesh

4 Department of Journalism, Media and Communications, Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Haider Mahmood

5 Department of Finance, College of Business Administration, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, 173, Alkharj, 11942 Saudi Arabia

Ijaz Younis

Associated data.

Data sources and relevant links are provided in the paper to access data.

Climate change is a long-lasting change in the weather arrays across tropics to polls. It is a global threat that has embarked on to put stress on various sectors. This study is aimed to conceptually engineer how climate variability is deteriorating the sustainability of diverse sectors worldwide. Specifically, the agricultural sector’s vulnerability is a globally concerning scenario, as sufficient production and food supplies are threatened due to irreversible weather fluctuations. In turn, it is challenging the global feeding patterns, particularly in countries with agriculture as an integral part of their economy and total productivity. Climate change has also put the integrity and survival of many species at stake due to shifts in optimum temperature ranges, thereby accelerating biodiversity loss by progressively changing the ecosystem structures. Climate variations increase the likelihood of particular food and waterborne and vector-borne diseases, and a recent example is a coronavirus pandemic. Climate change also accelerates the enigma of antimicrobial resistance, another threat to human health due to the increasing incidence of resistant pathogenic infections. Besides, the global tourism industry is devastated as climate change impacts unfavorable tourism spots. The methodology investigates hypothetical scenarios of climate variability and attempts to describe the quality of evidence to facilitate readers’ careful, critical engagement. Secondary data is used to identify sustainability issues such as environmental, social, and economic viability. To better understand the problem, gathered the information in this report from various media outlets, research agencies, policy papers, newspapers, and other sources. This review is a sectorial assessment of climate change mitigation and adaptation approaches worldwide in the aforementioned sectors and the associated economic costs. According to the findings, government involvement is necessary for the country’s long-term development through strict accountability of resources and regulations implemented in the past to generate cutting-edge climate policy. Therefore, mitigating the impacts of climate change must be of the utmost importance, and hence, this global threat requires global commitment to address its dreadful implications to ensure global sustenance.

Introduction

Worldwide observed and anticipated climatic changes for the twenty-first century and global warming are significant global changes that have been encountered during the past 65 years. Climate change (CC) is an inter-governmental complex challenge globally with its influence over various components of the ecological, environmental, socio-political, and socio-economic disciplines (Adger et al.  2005 ; Leal Filho et al.  2021 ; Feliciano et al.  2022 ). Climate change involves heightened temperatures across numerous worlds (Battisti and Naylor  2009 ; Schuurmans  2021 ; Weisheimer and Palmer  2005 ; Yadav et al.  2015 ). With the onset of the industrial revolution, the problem of earth climate was amplified manifold (Leppänen et al.  2014 ). It is reported that the immediate attention and due steps might increase the probability of overcoming its devastating impacts. It is not plausible to interpret the exact consequences of climate change (CC) on a sectoral basis (Izaguirre et al.  2021 ; Jurgilevich et al.  2017 ), which is evident by the emerging level of recognition plus the inclusion of climatic uncertainties at both local and national level of policymaking (Ayers et al.  2014 ).

Climate change is characterized based on the comprehensive long-haul temperature and precipitation trends and other components such as pressure and humidity level in the surrounding environment. Besides, the irregular weather patterns, retreating of global ice sheets, and the corresponding elevated sea level rise are among the most renowned international and domestic effects of climate change (Lipczynska-Kochany  2018 ; Michel et al.  2021 ; Murshed and Dao 2020 ). Before the industrial revolution, natural sources, including volcanoes, forest fires, and seismic activities, were regarded as the distinct sources of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and H 2 O into the atmosphere (Murshed et al. 2020 ; Hussain et al.  2020 ; Sovacool et al.  2021 ; Usman and Balsalobre-Lorente 2022 ; Murshed 2022 ). United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) struck a major agreement to tackle climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments required for a sustainable low-carbon future at Conference of the Parties (COP-21) in Paris on December 12, 2015. The Paris Agreement expands on the Convention by bringing all nations together for the first time in a single cause to undertake ambitious measures to prevent climate change and adapt to its impacts, with increased funding to assist developing countries in doing so. As so, it marks a turning point in the global climate fight. The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to improve the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C over pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C (Sharma et al. 2020 ; Sharif et al. 2020 ; Chien et al. 2021 .

Furthermore, the agreement aspires to strengthen nations’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and align financing flows with low GHG emissions and climate-resilient paths (Shahbaz et al. 2019 ; Anwar et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2022a ). To achieve these lofty goals, adequate financial resources must be mobilized and provided, as well as a new technology framework and expanded capacity building, allowing developing countries and the most vulnerable countries to act under their respective national objectives. The agreement also establishes a more transparent action and support mechanism. All Parties are required by the Paris Agreement to do their best through “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the coming years (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2020 ). It includes obligations that all Parties regularly report on their emissions and implementation activities. A global stock-take will be conducted every five years to review collective progress toward the agreement’s goal and inform the Parties’ future individual actions. The Paris Agreement became available for signature on April 22, 2016, Earth Day, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. On November 4, 2016, it went into effect 30 days after the so-called double threshold was met (ratification by 55 nations accounting for at least 55% of world emissions). More countries have ratified and continue to ratify the agreement since then, bringing 125 Parties in early 2017. To fully operationalize the Paris Agreement, a work program was initiated in Paris to define mechanisms, processes, and recommendations on a wide range of concerns (Murshed et al. 2021 ). Since 2016, Parties have collaborated in subsidiary bodies (APA, SBSTA, and SBI) and numerous formed entities. The Conference of the Parties functioning as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA) convened for the first time in November 2016 in Marrakesh in conjunction with COP22 and made its first two resolutions. The work plan is scheduled to be finished by 2018. Some mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the emission in the prospective of Paris agreement are following firstly, a long-term goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, secondly, to aim to limit the rise to 1.5 °C, since this would significantly reduce risks and the impacts of climate change, thirdly, on the need for global emissions to peak as soon as possible, recognizing that this will take longer for developing countries, lastly, to undertake rapid reductions after that under the best available science, to achieve a balance between emissions and removals in the second half of the century. On the other side, some adaptation strategies are; strengthening societies’ ability to deal with the effects of climate change and to continue & expand international assistance for developing nations’ adaptation.

However, anthropogenic activities are currently regarded as most accountable for CC (Murshed et al. 2022 ). Apart from the industrial revolution, other anthropogenic activities include excessive agricultural operations, which further involve the high use of fuel-based mechanization, burning of agricultural residues, burning fossil fuels, deforestation, national and domestic transportation sectors, etc. (Huang et al.  2016 ). Consequently, these anthropogenic activities lead to climatic catastrophes, damaging local and global infrastructure, human health, and total productivity. Energy consumption has mounted GHGs levels concerning warming temperatures as most of the energy production in developing countries comes from fossil fuels (Balsalobre-Lorente et al. 2022 ; Usman et al. 2022b ; Abbass et al. 2021a ; Ishikawa-Ishiwata and Furuya  2022 ).

This review aims to highlight the effects of climate change in a socio-scientific aspect by analyzing the existing literature on various sectorial pieces of evidence globally that influence the environment. Although this review provides a thorough examination of climate change and its severe affected sectors that pose a grave danger for global agriculture, biodiversity, health, economy, forestry, and tourism, and to purpose some practical prophylactic measures and mitigation strategies to be adapted as sound substitutes to survive from climate change (CC) impacts. The societal implications of irregular weather patterns and other effects of climate changes are discussed in detail. Some numerous sustainable mitigation measures and adaptation practices and techniques at the global level are discussed in this review with an in-depth focus on its economic, social, and environmental aspects. Methods of data collection section are included in the supplementary information.

Review methodology

Related study and its objectives.

Today, we live an ordinary life in the beautiful digital, globalized world where climate change has a decisive role. What happens in one country has a massive influence on geographically far apart countries, which points to the current crisis known as COVID-19 (Sarkar et al.  2021 ). The most dangerous disease like COVID-19 has affected the world’s climate changes and economic conditions (Abbass et al. 2022 ; Pirasteh-Anosheh et al.  2021 ). The purpose of the present study is to review the status of research on the subject, which is based on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures” by systematically reviewing past published and unpublished research work. Furthermore, the current study seeks to comment on research on the same topic and suggest future research on the same topic. Specifically, the present study aims: The first one is, organize publications to make them easy and quick to find. Secondly, to explore issues in this area, propose an outline of research for future work. The third aim of the study is to synthesize the previous literature on climate change, various sectors, and their mitigation measurement. Lastly , classify the articles according to the different methods and procedures that have been adopted.

Review methodology for reviewers

This review-based article followed systematic literature review techniques that have proved the literature review as a rigorous framework (Benita  2021 ; Tranfield et al.  2003 ). Moreover, we illustrate in Fig.  1 the search method that we have started for this research. First, finalized the research theme to search literature (Cooper et al.  2018 ). Second, used numerous research databases to search related articles and download from the database (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus Index Journals, Emerald, Elsevier Science Direct, Springer, and Sciverse). We focused on various articles, with research articles, feedback pieces, short notes, debates, and review articles published in scholarly journals. Reports used to search for multiple keywords such as “Climate Change,” “Mitigation and Adaptation,” “Department of Agriculture and Human Health,” “Department of Biodiversity and Forestry,” etc.; in summary, keyword list and full text have been made. Initially, the search for keywords yielded a large amount of literature.

Methodology search for finalized articles for investigations.

Source : constructed by authors

Since 2020, it has been impossible to review all the articles found; some restrictions have been set for the literature exhibition. The study searched 95 articles on a different database mentioned above based on the nature of the study. It excluded 40 irrelevant papers due to copied from a previous search after readings tiles, abstract and full pieces. The criteria for inclusion were: (i) articles focused on “Global Climate Change Impacts, adaptation, and sustainable mitigation measures,” and (ii) the search key terms related to study requirements. The complete procedure yielded 55 articles for our study. We repeat our search on the “Web of Science and Google Scholars” database to enhance the search results and check the referenced articles.

In this study, 55 articles are reviewed systematically and analyzed for research topics and other aspects, such as the methods, contexts, and theories used in these studies. Furthermore, this study analyzes closely related areas to provide unique research opportunities in the future. The study also discussed future direction opportunities and research questions by understanding the research findings climate changes and other affected sectors. The reviewed paper framework analysis process is outlined in Fig.  2 .

Framework of the analysis Process.

Natural disasters and climate change’s socio-economic consequences

Natural and environmental disasters can be highly variable from year to year; some years pass with very few deaths before a significant disaster event claims many lives (Symanski et al.  2021 ). Approximately 60,000 people globally died from natural disasters each year on average over the past decade (Ritchie and Roser  2014 ; Wiranata and Simbolon  2021 ). So, according to the report, around 0.1% of global deaths. Annual variability in the number and share of deaths from natural disasters in recent decades are shown in Fig.  3 . The number of fatalities can be meager—sometimes less than 10,000, and as few as 0.01% of all deaths. But shock events have a devastating impact: the 1983–1985 famine and drought in Ethiopia; the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami; Cyclone Nargis, which struck Myanmar in 2008; and the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake in Haiti and now recent example is COVID-19 pandemic (Erman et al.  2021 ). These events pushed global disaster deaths to over 200,000—more than 0.4% of deaths in these years. Low-frequency, high-impact events such as earthquakes and tsunamis are not preventable, but such high losses of human life are. Historical evidence shows that earlier disaster detection, more robust infrastructure, emergency preparedness, and response programmers have substantially reduced disaster deaths worldwide. Low-income is also the most vulnerable to disasters; improving living conditions, facilities, and response services in these areas would be critical in reducing natural disaster deaths in the coming decades.

Global deaths from natural disasters, 1978 to 2020.

Source EMDAT ( 2020 )

The interior regions of the continent are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures (Dimri et al.  2018 ; Goes et al.  2020 ; Mannig et al.  2018 ; Schuurmans  2021 ). Weather patterns change due to the shortage of natural resources (water), increase in glacier melting, and rising mercury are likely to cause extinction to many planted species (Gampe et al.  2016 ; Mihiretu et al.  2021 ; Shaffril et al.  2018 ).On the other hand, the coastal ecosystem is on the verge of devastation (Perera et al.  2018 ; Phillips  2018 ). The temperature rises, insect disease outbreaks, health-related problems, and seasonal and lifestyle changes are persistent, with a strong probability of these patterns continuing in the future (Abbass et al. 2021c ; Hussain et al.  2018 ). At the global level, a shortage of good infrastructure and insufficient adaptive capacity are hammering the most (IPCC  2013 ). In addition to the above concerns, a lack of environmental education and knowledge, outdated consumer behavior, a scarcity of incentives, a lack of legislation, and the government’s lack of commitment to climate change contribute to the general public’s concerns. By 2050, a 2 to 3% rise in mercury and a drastic shift in rainfall patterns may have serious consequences (Huang et al. 2022 ; Gorst et al.  2018 ). Natural and environmental calamities caused huge losses globally, such as decreased agriculture outputs, rehabilitation of the system, and rebuilding necessary technologies (Ali and Erenstein  2017 ; Ramankutty et al.  2018 ; Yu et al.  2021 ) (Table ​ (Table1). 1 ). Furthermore, in the last 3 or 4 years, the world has been plagued by smog-related eye and skin diseases, as well as a rise in road accidents due to poor visibility.

Main natural danger statistics for 1985–2020 at the global level

Source: EM-DAT ( 2020 )

Climate change and agriculture

Global agriculture is the ultimate sector responsible for 30–40% of all greenhouse emissions, which makes it a leading industry predominantly contributing to climate warming and significantly impacted by it (Grieg; Mishra et al.  2021 ; Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Thornton and Lipper  2014 ). Numerous agro-environmental and climatic factors that have a dominant influence on agriculture productivity (Pautasso et al.  2012 ) are significantly impacted in response to precipitation extremes including floods, forest fires, and droughts (Huang  2004 ). Besides, the immense dependency on exhaustible resources also fuels the fire and leads global agriculture to become prone to devastation. Godfray et al. ( 2010 ) mentioned that decline in agriculture challenges the farmer’s quality of life and thus a significant factor to poverty as the food and water supplies are critically impacted by CC (Ortiz et al.  2021 ; Rosenzweig et al.  2014 ). As an essential part of the economic systems, especially in developing countries, agricultural systems affect the overall economy and potentially the well-being of households (Schlenker and Roberts  2009 ). According to the report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, i.e., CH 4, CO 2 , and N 2 O, are increased in the air to extraordinary levels over the last few centuries (Usman and Makhdum 2021 ; Stocker et al.  2013 ). Climate change is the composite outcome of two different factors. The first is the natural causes, and the second is the anthropogenic actions (Karami 2012 ). It is also forecasted that the world may experience a typical rise in temperature stretching from 1 to 3.7 °C at the end of this century (Pachauri et al. 2014 ). The world’s crop production is also highly vulnerable to these global temperature-changing trends as raised temperatures will pose severe negative impacts on crop growth (Reidsma et al. 2009 ). Some of the recent modeling about the fate of global agriculture is briefly described below.

Decline in cereal productivity

Crop productivity will also be affected dramatically in the next few decades due to variations in integral abiotic factors such as temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and CO 2 . These all factors are included in various regulatory instruments like progress and growth, weather-tempted changes, pest invasions (Cammell and Knight 1992 ), accompanying disease snags (Fand et al. 2012 ), water supplies (Panda et al. 2003 ), high prices of agro-products in world’s agriculture industry, and preeminent quantity of fertilizer consumption. Lobell and field ( 2007 ) claimed that from 1962 to 2002, wheat crop output had condensed significantly due to rising temperatures. Therefore, during 1980–2011, the common wheat productivity trends endorsed extreme temperature events confirmed by Gourdji et al. ( 2013 ) around South Asia, South America, and Central Asia. Various other studies (Asseng, Cao, Zhang, and Ludwig 2009 ; Asseng et al. 2013 ; García et al. 2015 ; Ortiz et al. 2021 ) also proved that wheat output is negatively affected by the rising temperatures and also caused adverse effects on biomass productivity (Calderini et al. 1999 ; Sadras and Slafer 2012 ). Hereafter, the rice crop is also influenced by the high temperatures at night. These difficulties will worsen because the temperature will be rising further in the future owing to CC (Tebaldi et al. 2006 ). Another research conducted in China revealed that a 4.6% of rice production per 1 °C has happened connected with the advancement in night temperatures (Tao et al. 2006 ). Moreover, the average night temperature growth also affected rice indicia cultivar’s output pragmatically during 25 years in the Philippines (Peng et al. 2004 ). It is anticipated that the increase in world average temperature will also cause a substantial reduction in yield (Hatfield et al. 2011 ; Lobell and Gourdji 2012 ). In the southern hemisphere, Parry et al. ( 2007 ) noted a rise of 1–4 °C in average daily temperatures at the end of spring season unti the middle of summers, and this raised temperature reduced crop output by cutting down the time length for phenophases eventually reduce the yield (Hatfield and Prueger 2015 ; R. Ortiz 2008 ). Also, world climate models have recommended that humid and subtropical regions expect to be plentiful prey to the upcoming heat strokes (Battisti and Naylor 2009 ). Grain production is the amalgamation of two constituents: the average weight and the grain output/m 2 , however, in crop production. Crop output is mainly accredited to the grain quantity (Araus et al. 2008 ; Gambín and Borrás 2010 ). In the times of grain set, yield resources are mainly strewn between hitherto defined components, i.e., grain usual weight and grain output, which presents a trade-off between them (Gambín and Borrás 2010 ) beside disparities in per grain integration (B. L. Gambín et al. 2006 ). In addition to this, the maize crop is also susceptible to raised temperatures, principally in the flowering stage (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). In reality, the lower grain number is associated with insufficient acclimatization due to intense photosynthesis and higher respiration and the high-temperature effect on the reproduction phenomena (Edreira and Otegui 2013 ). During the flowering phase, maize visible to heat (30–36 °C) seemed less anthesis-silking intermissions (Edreira et al. 2011 ). Another research by Dupuis and Dumas ( 1990 ) proved that a drop in spikelet when directly visible to high temperatures above 35 °C in vitro pollination. Abnormalities in kernel number claimed by Vega et al. ( 2001 ) is related to conceded plant development during a flowering phase that is linked with the active ear growth phase and categorized as a critical phase for approximation of kernel number during silking (Otegui and Bonhomme 1998 ).

The retort of rice output to high temperature presents disparities in flowering patterns, and seed set lessens and lessens grain weight (Qasim et al. 2020 ; Qasim, Hammad, Maqsood, Tariq, & Chawla). During the daytime, heat directly impacts flowers which lessens the thesis period and quickens the earlier peak flowering (Tao et al. 2006 ). Antagonistic effect of higher daytime temperature d on pollen sprouting proposed seed set decay, whereas, seed set was lengthily reduced than could be explicated by pollen growing at high temperatures 40◦C (Matsui et al. 2001 ).

The decline in wheat output is linked with higher temperatures, confirmed in numerous studies (Semenov 2009 ; Stone and Nicolas 1994 ). High temperatures fast-track the arrangements of plant expansion (Blum et al. 2001 ), diminution photosynthetic process (Salvucci and Crafts‐Brandner 2004 ), and also considerably affect the reproductive operations (Farooq et al. 2011 ).

The destructive impacts of CC induced weather extremes to deteriorate the integrity of crops (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ), e.g., Spartan cold and extreme fog cause falling and discoloration of betel leaves (Rosenzweig et al. 2001 ), giving them a somehow reddish appearance, squeezing of lemon leaves (Pautasso et al. 2012 ), as well as root rot of pineapple, have reported (Vedwan and Rhoades 2001 ). Henceforth, in tackling the disruptive effects of CC, several short-term and long-term management approaches are the crucial need of time (Fig.  4 ). Moreover, various studies (Chaudhary et al. 2011 ; Patz et al. 2005 ; Pautasso et al. 2012 ) have demonstrated adapting trends such as ameliorating crop diversity can yield better adaptability towards CC.

Schematic description of potential impacts of climate change on the agriculture sector and the appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures to overcome its impact.

Climate change impacts on biodiversity

Global biodiversity is among the severe victims of CC because it is the fastest emerging cause of species loss. Studies demonstrated that the massive scale species dynamics are considerably associated with diverse climatic events (Abraham and Chain 1988 ; Manes et al. 2021 ; A. M. D. Ortiz et al. 2021 ). Both the pace and magnitude of CC are altering the compatible habitat ranges for living entities of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial regions. Alterations in general climate regimes influence the integrity of ecosystems in numerous ways, such as variation in the relative abundance of species, range shifts, changes in activity timing, and microhabitat use (Bates et al. 2014 ). The geographic distribution of any species often depends upon its ability to tolerate environmental stresses, biological interactions, and dispersal constraints. Hence, instead of the CC, the local species must only accept, adapt, move, or face extinction (Berg et al. 2010 ). So, the best performer species have a better survival capacity for adjusting to new ecosystems or a decreased perseverance to survive where they are already situated (Bates et al. 2014 ). An important aspect here is the inadequate habitat connectivity and access to microclimates, also crucial in raising the exposure to climate warming and extreme heatwave episodes. For example, the carbon sequestration rates are undergoing fluctuations due to climate-driven expansion in the range of global mangroves (Cavanaugh et al. 2014 ).

Similarly, the loss of kelp-forest ecosystems in various regions and its occupancy by the seaweed turfs has set the track for elevated herbivory by the high influx of tropical fish populations. Not only this, the increased water temperatures have exacerbated the conditions far away from the physiological tolerance level of the kelp communities (Vergés et al. 2016 ; Wernberg et al. 2016 ). Another pertinent danger is the devastation of keystone species, which even has more pervasive effects on the entire communities in that habitat (Zarnetske et al. 2012 ). It is particularly important as CC does not specify specific populations or communities. Eventually, this CC-induced redistribution of species may deteriorate carbon storage and the net ecosystem productivity (Weed et al. 2013 ). Among the typical disruptions, the prominent ones include impacts on marine and terrestrial productivity, marine community assembly, and the extended invasion of toxic cyanobacteria bloom (Fossheim et al. 2015 ).

The CC-impacted species extinction is widely reported in the literature (Beesley et al. 2019 ; Urban 2015 ), and the predictions of demise until the twenty-first century are dreadful (Abbass et al. 2019 ; Pereira et al. 2013 ). In a few cases, northward shifting of species may not be formidable as it allows mountain-dwelling species to find optimum climates. However, the migrant species may be trapped in isolated and incompatible habitats due to losing topography and range (Dullinger et al. 2012 ). For example, a study indicated that the American pika has been extirpated or intensely diminished in some regions, primarily attributed to the CC-impacted extinction or at least local extirpation (Stewart et al. 2015 ). Besides, the anticipation of persistent responses to the impacts of CC often requires data records of several decades to rigorously analyze the critical pre and post CC patterns at species and ecosystem levels (Manes et al. 2021 ; Testa et al. 2018 ).

Nonetheless, the availability of such long-term data records is rare; hence, attempts are needed to focus on these profound aspects. Biodiversity is also vulnerable to the other associated impacts of CC, such as rising temperatures, droughts, and certain invasive pest species. For instance, a study revealed the changes in the composition of plankton communities attributed to rising temperatures. Henceforth, alterations in such aquatic producer communities, i.e., diatoms and calcareous plants, can ultimately lead to variation in the recycling of biological carbon. Moreover, such changes are characterized as a potential contributor to CO 2 differences between the Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods (Kohfeld et al. 2005 ).

Climate change implications on human health

It is an understood corporality that human health is a significant victim of CC (Costello et al. 2009 ). According to the WHO, CC might be responsible for 250,000 additional deaths per year during 2030–2050 (Watts et al. 2015 ). These deaths are attributed to extreme weather-induced mortality and morbidity and the global expansion of vector-borne diseases (Lemery et al. 2021; Yang and Usman 2021 ; Meierrieks 2021 ; UNEP 2017 ). Here, some of the emerging health issues pertinent to this global problem are briefly described.

Climate change and antimicrobial resistance with corresponding economic costs

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an up-surging complex global health challenge (Garner et al. 2019 ; Lemery et al. 2021 ). Health professionals across the globe are extremely worried due to this phenomenon that has critical potential to reverse almost all the progress that has been achieved so far in the health discipline (Gosling and Arnell 2016 ). A massive amount of antibiotics is produced by many pharmaceutical industries worldwide, and the pathogenic microorganisms are gradually developing resistance to them, which can be comprehended how strongly this aspect can shake the foundations of national and global economies (UNEP 2017 ). This statement is supported by the fact that AMR is not developing in a particular region or country. Instead, it is flourishing in every continent of the world (WHO 2018 ). This plague is heavily pushing humanity to the post-antibiotic era, in which currently antibiotic-susceptible pathogens will once again lead to certain endemics and pandemics after being resistant(WHO 2018 ). Undesirably, if this statement would become a factuality, there might emerge certain risks in undertaking sophisticated interventions such as chemotherapy, joint replacement cases, and organ transplantation (Su et al. 2018 ). Presently, the amplification of drug resistance cases has made common illnesses like pneumonia, post-surgical infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc., too difficult and costly to be treated or cure well (WHO 2018 ). From a simple example, it can be assumed how easily antibiotic-resistant strains can be transmitted from one person to another and ultimately travel across the boundaries (Berendonk et al. 2015 ). Talking about the second- and third-generation classes of antibiotics, e.g., most renowned generations of cephalosporin antibiotics that are more expensive, broad-spectrum, more toxic, and usually require more extended periods whenever prescribed to patients (Lemery et al. 2021 ; Pärnänen et al. 2019 ). This scenario has also revealed that the abundance of resistant strains of pathogens was also higher in the Southern part (WHO 2018 ). As southern parts are generally warmer than their counterparts, it is evident from this example how CC-induced global warming can augment the spread of antibiotic-resistant strains within the biosphere, eventually putting additional economic burden in the face of developing new and costlier antibiotics. The ARG exchange to susceptible bacteria through one of the potential mechanisms, transformation, transduction, and conjugation; Selection pressure can be caused by certain antibiotics, metals or pesticides, etc., as shown in Fig.  5 .

A typical interaction between the susceptible and resistant strains.

Source: Elsayed et al. ( 2021 ); Karkman et al. ( 2018 )

Certain studies highlighted that conventional urban wastewater treatment plants are typical hotspots where most bacterial strains exchange genetic material through horizontal gene transfer (Fig.  5 ). Although at present, the extent of risks associated with the antibiotic resistance found in wastewater is complicated; environmental scientists and engineers have particular concerns about the potential impacts of these antibiotic resistance genes on human health (Ashbolt 2015 ). At most undesirable and worst case, these antibiotic-resistant genes containing bacteria can make their way to enter into the environment (Pruden et al. 2013 ), irrigation water used for crops and public water supplies and ultimately become a part of food chains and food webs (Ma et al. 2019 ; D. Wu et al. 2019 ). This problem has been reported manifold in several countries (Hendriksen et al. 2019 ), where wastewater as a means of irrigated water is quite common.

Climate change and vector borne-diseases

Temperature is a fundamental factor for the sustenance of living entities regardless of an ecosystem. So, a specific living being, especially a pathogen, requires a sophisticated temperature range to exist on earth. The second essential component of CC is precipitation, which also impacts numerous infectious agents’ transport and dissemination patterns. Global rising temperature is a significant cause of many species extinction. On the one hand, this changing environmental temperature may be causing species extinction, and on the other, this warming temperature might favor the thriving of some new organisms. Here, it was evident that some pathogens may also upraise once non-evident or reported (Patz et al. 2000 ). This concept can be exemplified through certain pathogenic strains of microorganisms that how the likelihood of various diseases increases in response to climate warming-induced environmental changes (Table ​ (Table2 2 ).

Examples of how various environmental changes affect various infectious diseases in humans

Source: Aron and Patz ( 2001 )

A recent example is an outburst of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Republic of China, causing pneumonia and severe acute respiratory complications (Cui et al. 2021 ; Song et al. 2021 ). The large family of viruses is harbored in numerous animals, bats, and snakes in particular (livescience.com) with the subsequent transfer into human beings. Hence, it is worth noting that the thriving of numerous vectors involved in spreading various diseases is influenced by Climate change (Ogden 2018 ; Santos et al. 2021 ).

Psychological impacts of climate change

Climate change (CC) is responsible for the rapid dissemination and exaggeration of certain epidemics and pandemics. In addition to the vast apparent impacts of climate change on health, forestry, agriculture, etc., it may also have psychological implications on vulnerable societies. It can be exemplified through the recent outburst of (COVID-19) in various countries around the world (Pal 2021 ). Besides, the victims of this viral infection have made healthy beings scarier and terrified. In the wake of such epidemics, people with common colds or fever are also frightened and must pass specific regulatory protocols. Living in such situations continuously terrifies the public and makes the stress familiar, which eventually makes them psychologically weak (npr.org).

CC boosts the extent of anxiety, distress, and other issues in public, pushing them to develop various mental-related problems. Besides, frequent exposure to extreme climatic catastrophes such as geological disasters also imprints post-traumatic disorder, and their ubiquitous occurrence paves the way to developing chronic psychological dysfunction. Moreover, repetitive listening from media also causes an increase in the person’s stress level (Association 2020 ). Similarly, communities living in flood-prone areas constantly live in extreme fear of drowning and die by floods. In addition to human lives, the flood-induced destruction of physical infrastructure is a specific reason for putting pressure on these communities (Ogden 2018 ). For instance, Ogden ( 2018 ) comprehensively denoted that Katrina’s Hurricane augmented the mental health issues in the victim communities.

Climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Forests are the global regulators of the world’s climate (FAO 2018 ) and have an indispensable role in regulating global carbon and nitrogen cycles (Rehman et al. 2021 ; Reichstein and Carvalhais 2019 ). Hence, disturbances in forest ecology affect the micro and macro-climates (Ellison et al. 2017 ). Climate warming, in return, has profound impacts on the growth and productivity of transboundary forests by influencing the temperature and precipitation patterns, etc. As CC induces specific changes in the typical structure and functions of ecosystems (Zhang et al. 2017 ) as well impacts forest health, climate change also has several devastating consequences such as forest fires, droughts, pest outbreaks (EPA 2018 ), and last but not the least is the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities. The rising frequency and intensity of another CC product, i.e., droughts, pose plenty of challenges to the well-being of global forests (Diffenbaugh et al. 2017 ), which is further projected to increase soon (Hartmann et al. 2018 ; Lehner et al. 2017 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ). Hence, CC induces storms, with more significant impacts also put extra pressure on the survival of the global forests (Martínez-Alvarado et al. 2018 ), significantly since their influences are augmented during higher winter precipitations with corresponding wetter soils causing weak root anchorage of trees (Brázdil et al. 2018 ). Surging temperature regimes causes alterations in usual precipitation patterns, which is a significant hurdle for the survival of temperate forests (Allen et al. 2010 ; Flannigan et al. 2013 ), letting them encounter severe stress and disturbances which adversely affects the local tree species (Hubbart et al. 2016 ; Millar and Stephenson 2015 ; Rehman et al. 2021 ).

Climate change impacts on forest-dependent communities

Forests are the fundamental livelihood resource for about 1.6 billion people worldwide; out of them, 350 million are distinguished with relatively higher reliance (Bank 2008 ). Agro-forestry-dependent communities comprise 1.2 billion, and 60 million indigenous people solely rely on forests and their products to sustain their lives (Sunderlin et al. 2005 ). For example, in the entire African continent, more than 2/3rd of inhabitants depend on forest resources and woodlands for their alimonies, e.g., food, fuelwood and grazing (Wasiq and Ahmad 2004 ). The livings of these people are more intensely affected by the climatic disruptions making their lives harder (Brown et al. 2014 ). On the one hand, forest communities are incredibly vulnerable to CC due to their livelihoods, cultural and spiritual ties as well as socio-ecological connections, and on the other, they are not familiar with the term “climate change.” (Rahman and Alam 2016 ). Among the destructive impacts of temperature and rainfall, disruption of the agroforestry crops with resultant downscale growth and yield (Macchi et al. 2008 ). Cruz ( 2015 ) ascribed that forest-dependent smallholder farmers in the Philippines face the enigma of delayed fruiting, more severe damages by insect and pest incidences due to unfavorable temperature regimes, and changed rainfall patterns.

Among these series of challenges to forest communities, their well-being is also distinctly vulnerable to CC. Though the detailed climate change impacts on human health have been comprehensively mentioned in the previous section, some studies have listed a few more devastating effects on the prosperity of forest-dependent communities. For instance, the Himalayan people have been experiencing frequent skin-borne diseases such as malaria and other skin diseases due to increasing mosquitoes, wild boar as well, and new wasps species, particularly in higher altitudes that were almost non-existent before last 5–10 years (Xu et al. 2008 ). Similarly, people living at high altitudes in Bangladesh have experienced frequent mosquito-borne calamities (Fardous; Sharma 2012 ). In addition, the pace of other waterborne diseases such as infectious diarrhea, cholera, pathogenic induced abdominal complications and dengue has also been boosted in other distinguished regions of Bangladesh (Cell 2009 ; Gunter et al. 2008 ).

Pest outbreak

Upscaling hotter climate may positively affect the mobile organisms with shorter generation times because they can scurry from harsh conditions than the immobile species (Fettig et al. 2013 ; Schoene and Bernier 2012 ) and are also relatively more capable of adapting to new environments (Jactel et al. 2019 ). It reveals that insects adapt quickly to global warming due to their mobility advantages. Due to past outbreaks, the trees (forests) are relatively more susceptible victims (Kurz et al. 2008 ). Before CC, the influence of factors mentioned earlier, i.e., droughts and storms, was existent and made the forests susceptible to insect pest interventions; however, the global forests remain steadfast, assiduous, and green (Jactel et al. 2019 ). The typical reasons could be the insect herbivores were regulated by several tree defenses and pressures of predation (Wilkinson and Sherratt 2016 ). As climate greatly influences these phenomena, the global forests cannot be so sedulous against such challenges (Jactel et al. 2019 ). Table ​ Table3 3 demonstrates some of the particular considerations with practical examples that are essential while mitigating the impacts of CC in the forestry sector.

Essential considerations while mitigating the climate change impacts on the forestry sector

Source : Fischer ( 2019 )

Climate change impacts on tourism

Tourism is a commercial activity that has roots in multi-dimensions and an efficient tool with adequate job generation potential, revenue creation, earning of spectacular foreign exchange, enhancement in cross-cultural promulgation and cooperation, a business tool for entrepreneurs and eventually for the country’s national development (Arshad et al. 2018 ; Scott 2021 ). Among a plethora of other disciplines, the tourism industry is also a distinct victim of climate warming (Gössling et al. 2012 ; Hall et al. 2015 ) as the climate is among the essential resources that enable tourism in particular regions as most preferred locations. Different places at different times of the year attract tourists both within and across the countries depending upon the feasibility and compatibility of particular weather patterns. Hence, the massive variations in these weather patterns resulting from CC will eventually lead to monumental challenges to the local economy in that specific area’s particular and national economy (Bujosa et al. 2015 ). For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report demonstrated that the global tourism industry had faced a considerable decline in the duration of ski season, including the loss of some ski areas and the dramatic shifts in tourist destinations’ climate warming.

Furthermore, different studies (Neuvonen et al. 2015 ; Scott et al. 2004 ) indicated that various currently perfect tourist spots, e.g., coastal areas, splendid islands, and ski resorts, will suffer consequences of CC. It is also worth noting that the quality and potential of administrative management potential to cope with the influence of CC on the tourism industry is of crucial significance, which renders specific strengths of resiliency to numerous destinations to withstand against it (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). Similarly, in the partial or complete absence of adequate socio-economic and socio-political capital, the high-demanding tourist sites scurry towards the verge of vulnerability. The susceptibility of tourism is based on different components such as the extent of exposure, sensitivity, life-supporting sectors, and capacity assessment factors (Füssel and Hildén 2014 ). It is obvious corporality that sectors such as health, food, ecosystems, human habitat, infrastructure, water availability, and the accessibility of a particular region are prone to CC. Henceforth, the sensitivity of these critical sectors to CC and, in return, the adaptive measures are a hallmark in determining the composite vulnerability of climate warming (Ionescu et al. 2009 ).

Moreover, the dependence on imported food items, poor hygienic conditions, and inadequate health professionals are dominant aspects affecting the local terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity. Meanwhile, the greater dependency on ecosystem services and its products also makes a destination more fragile to become a prey of CC (Rizvi et al. 2015 ). Some significant non-climatic factors are important indicators of a particular ecosystem’s typical health and functioning, e.g., resource richness and abundance portray the picture of ecosystem stability. Similarly, the species abundance is also a productive tool that ensures that the ecosystem has a higher buffering capacity, which is terrific in terms of resiliency (Roscher et al. 2013 ).

Climate change impacts on the economic sector

Climate plays a significant role in overall productivity and economic growth. Due to its increasingly global existence and its effect on economic growth, CC has become one of the major concerns of both local and international environmental policymakers (Ferreira et al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Abbass et al. 2021b ; Lamperti et al. 2021 ). The adverse effects of CC on the overall productivity factor of the agricultural sector are therefore significant for understanding the creation of local adaptation policies and the composition of productive climate policy contracts. Previous studies on CC in the world have already forecasted its effects on the agricultural sector. Researchers have found that global CC will impact the agricultural sector in different world regions. The study of the impacts of CC on various agrarian activities in other demographic areas and the development of relative strategies to respond to effects has become a focal point for researchers (Chandioet al. 2020 ; Gleditsch 2021 ; Mosavi et al. 2020 ).

With the rapid growth of global warming since the 1980s, the temperature has started increasing globally, which resulted in the incredible transformation of rain and evaporation in the countries. The agricultural development of many countries has been reliant, delicate, and susceptible to CC for a long time, and it is on the development of agriculture total factor productivity (ATFP) influence different crops and yields of farmers (Alhassan 2021 ; Wu  2020 ).

Food security and natural disasters are increasing rapidly in the world. Several major climatic/natural disasters have impacted local crop production in the countries concerned. The effects of these natural disasters have been poorly controlled by the development of the economies and populations and may affect human life as well. One example is China, which is among the world’s most affected countries, vulnerable to natural disasters due to its large population, harsh environmental conditions, rapid CC, low environmental stability, and disaster power. According to the January 2016 statistical survey, China experienced an economic loss of 298.3 billion Yuan, and about 137 million Chinese people were severely affected by various natural disasters (Xie et al. 2018 ).

Mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate changes

Adaptation and mitigation are the crucial factors to address the response to CC (Jahanzad et al. 2020 ). Researchers define mitigation on climate changes, and on the other hand, adaptation directly impacts climate changes like floods. To some extent, mitigation reduces or moderates greenhouse gas emission, and it becomes a critical issue both economically and environmentally (Botzen et al. 2021 ; Jahanzad et al. 2020 ; Kongsager 2018 ; Smit et al. 2000 ; Vale et al. 2021 ; Usman et al. 2021 ; Verheyen 2005 ).

Researchers have deep concern about the adaptation and mitigation methodologies in sectoral and geographical contexts. Agriculture, industry, forestry, transport, and land use are the main sectors to adapt and mitigate policies(Kärkkäinen et al. 2020 ; Waheed et al. 2021 ). Adaptation and mitigation require particular concern both at the national and international levels. The world has faced a significant problem of climate change in the last decades, and adaptation to these effects is compulsory for economic and social development. To adapt and mitigate against CC, one should develop policies and strategies at the international level (Hussain et al. 2020 ). Figure  6 depicts the list of current studies on sectoral impacts of CC with adaptation and mitigation measures globally.

Sectoral impacts of climate change with adaptation and mitigation measures.

Conclusion and future perspectives

Specific socio-agricultural, socio-economic, and physical systems are the cornerstone of psychological well-being, and the alteration in these systems by CC will have disastrous impacts. Climate variability, alongside other anthropogenic and natural stressors, influences human and environmental health sustainability. Food security is another concerning scenario that may lead to compromised food quality, higher food prices, and inadequate food distribution systems. Global forests are challenged by different climatic factors such as storms, droughts, flash floods, and intense precipitation. On the other hand, their anthropogenic wiping is aggrandizing their existence. Undoubtedly, the vulnerability scale of the world’s regions differs; however, appropriate mitigation and adaptation measures can aid the decision-making bodies in developing effective policies to tackle its impacts. Presently, modern life on earth has tailored to consistent climatic patterns, and accordingly, adapting to such considerable variations is of paramount importance. Because the faster changes in climate will make it harder to survive and adjust, this globally-raising enigma calls for immediate attention at every scale ranging from elementary community level to international level. Still, much effort, research, and dedication are required, which is the most critical time. Some policy implications can help us to mitigate the consequences of climate change, especially the most affected sectors like the agriculture sector;

Warming might lengthen the season in frost-prone growing regions (temperate and arctic zones), allowing for longer-maturing seasonal cultivars with better yields (Pfadenhauer 2020 ; Bonacci 2019 ). Extending the planting season may allow additional crops each year; when warming leads to frequent warmer months highs over critical thresholds, a split season with a brief summer fallow may be conceivable for short-period crops such as wheat barley, cereals, and many other vegetable crops. The capacity to prolong the planting season in tropical and subtropical places where the harvest season is constrained by precipitation or agriculture farming occurs after the year may be more limited and dependent on how precipitation patterns vary (Wu et al. 2017 ).

The genetic component is comprehensive for many yields, but it is restricted like kiwi fruit for a few. Ali et al. ( 2017 ) investigated how new crops will react to climatic changes (also stated in Mall et al. 2017 ). Hot temperature, drought, insect resistance; salt tolerance; and overall crop production and product quality increases would all be advantageous (Akkari 2016 ). Genetic mapping and engineering can introduce a greater spectrum of features. The adoption of genetically altered cultivars has been slowed, particularly in the early forecasts owing to the complexity in ensuring features are expediently expressed throughout the entire plant, customer concerns, economic profitability, and regulatory impediments (Wirehn 2018 ; Davidson et al. 2016 ).

To get the full benefit of the CO 2 would certainly require additional nitrogen and other fertilizers. Nitrogen not consumed by the plants may be excreted into groundwater, discharged into water surface, or emitted from the land, soil nitrous oxide when large doses of fertilizer are sprayed. Increased nitrogen levels in groundwater sources have been related to human chronic illnesses and impact marine ecosystems. Cultivation, grain drying, and other field activities have all been examined in depth in the studies (Barua et al. 2018 ).

• The technological and socio-economic adaptation

The policy consequence of the causative conclusion is that as a source of alternative energy, biofuel production is one of the routes that explain oil price volatility separate from international macroeconomic factors. Even though biofuel production has just begun in a few sample nations, there is still a tremendous worldwide need for feedstock to satisfy industrial expansion in China and the USA, which explains the food price relationship to the global oil price. Essentially, oil-exporting countries may create incentives in their economies to increase food production. It may accomplish by giving farmers financing, seedlings, fertilizers, and farming equipment. Because of the declining global oil price and, as a result, their earnings from oil export, oil-producing nations may be unable to subsidize food imports even in the near term. As a result, these countries can boost the agricultural value chain for export. It may be accomplished through R&D and adding value to their food products to increase income by correcting exchange rate misalignment and adverse trade terms. These nations may also diversify their economies away from oil, as dependence on oil exports alone is no longer economically viable given the extreme volatility of global oil prices. Finally, resource-rich and oil-exporting countries can convert to non-food renewable energy sources such as solar, hydro, coal, wind, wave, and tidal energy. By doing so, both world food and oil supplies would be maintained rather than harmed.

IRENA’s modeling work shows that, if a comprehensive policy framework is in place, efforts toward decarbonizing the energy future will benefit economic activity, jobs (outweighing losses in the fossil fuel industry), and welfare. Countries with weak domestic supply chains and a large reliance on fossil fuel income, in particular, must undertake structural reforms to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the energy transition. Governments continue to give major policy assistance to extract fossil fuels, including tax incentives, financing, direct infrastructure expenditures, exemptions from environmental regulations, and other measures. The majority of major oil and gas producing countries intend to increase output. Some countries intend to cut coal output, while others plan to maintain or expand it. While some nations are beginning to explore and execute policies aimed at a just and equitable transition away from fossil fuel production, these efforts have yet to impact major producing countries’ plans and goals. Verifiable and comparable data on fossil fuel output and assistance from governments and industries are critical to closing the production gap. Governments could increase openness by declaring their production intentions in their climate obligations under the Paris Agreement.

It is firmly believed that achieving the Paris Agreement commitments is doubtlful without undergoing renewable energy transition across the globe (Murshed 2020 ; Zhao et al. 2022 ). Policy instruments play the most important role in determining the degree of investment in renewable energy technology. This study examines the efficacy of various policy strategies in the renewable energy industry of multiple nations. Although its impact is more visible in established renewable energy markets, a renewable portfolio standard is also a useful policy instrument. The cost of producing renewable energy is still greater than other traditional energy sources. Furthermore, government incentives in the R&D sector can foster innovation in this field, resulting in cost reductions in the renewable energy industry. These nations may export their technologies and share their policy experiences by forming networks among their renewable energy-focused organizations. All policy measures aim to reduce production costs while increasing the proportion of renewables to a country’s energy system. Meanwhile, long-term contracts with renewable energy providers, government commitment and control, and the establishment of long-term goals can assist developing nations in deploying renewable energy technology in their energy sector.

Author contribution

KA: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Study design, Formal analysis, Visualization, Revised draft, Writing-review, and editing. MZQ: Writing the original manuscript, data collection, data analysis, Writing-review, and editing. HS: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, Conceptualization, Validation, Supervision, literature review, Revised drapt, and writing review and editing. MM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. HM: Writing review and editing, compiling the literature review, language editing. IY: Contribution to the contextualization of the theme, literature review, and writing review and editing.

Availability of data and material

Declarations.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Contributor Information

Kashif Abbass, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@ssabbafihsak .

Muhammad Zeeshan Qasim, Email: moc.kooltuo@888misaqnahseez .

Huaming Song, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@gnimauh .

Muntasir Murshed, Email: [email protected] .

Haider Mahmood, Email: moc.liamtoh@doomhamrediah .

Ijaz Younis, Email: nc.ude.tsujn@sinuoyzaji .

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Open Access

Climate change mitigation and Sustainable Development Goals: Evidence and research gaps

Roles Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Global Centre for Environment and Energy, Ahmedabad University, Ahmedabad, India

Roles Visualization, Writing – review & editing

Roles Methodology, Resources, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Climate Economics and Risk Management, Department of Technology, Management and Economics, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

• Minal Pathak, 
• Shaurya Patel, 
• Shreya Some

Published: March 4, 2024

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000366
• Reader Comments

Citation: Pathak M, Patel S, Some S (2024) Climate change mitigation and Sustainable Development Goals: Evidence and research gaps. PLOS Clim 3(3): e0000366. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000366

Editor: Jamie Males, PLOS Climate, UNITED KINGDOM

Copyright: © 2024 Pathak et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Never in the past three decades have the interlinkages between sustainable development and climate change been more pressing. The projected date when the remaining carbon budget will be exhausted if continuing at the current rate of emissions [ 1 ] is estimated to be around 2030- which also coincides with the timeline for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Recent global assessments clearly show the collective global performance on the targets relating to climate change, biodiversity and SDGs is abysmally poor [ 2 , 3 ]. Urgent efforts are needed to achieve both deep and rapid emissions reductions and to meet the SDGs to set the world on a pathway towards sustainable development.

The appreciation of interconnections between climate change and equity and sustainable development is not recent. In 1992, Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was restructured with a mandate to assess cross-cutting economic and other issues related to climate change including placing socio-economic perspectives in the context of sustainable development. IPCC’s Second Assessment Report in 1995 explicitly highlighted the different starting points of countries, trade-offs between economic growth and sustainability, distributional impacts of mitigation and adaptation actions and issues of intertemporal equity. This understanding has further deepened since then. Successive IPCC reports have highlighted the implications of efforts aimed at achieving targets under Climate Action (SDG 13) on SDGs [ 2 , 4 , 5 ]. There is now more evidence to show synergies of several climate actions with SDGs outweigh the trade-offs [ 6 ] Such actions include active transport, passive building design, clean energy, circular economy and urban green and blue infrastructure ( Fig 1 ) [ 7 ].

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000366.g001

A quick literature search on Scopus for papers focusing on climate change mitigation and SDGs showed 433 papers (Scopus search using search strings for each individual SDGs, for example: (TITLE-ABS-KEY ("SDG 1" OR "SDG1") AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ("Climate") AND TITLE-ABS-KEY ("mitigation" OR "mitigate"))). SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy), SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and 15 (Life on Land) were the most studied while SDGs 4 (Quality Education), 5 (Gender Equality), 10 (Reduced inequality) and 16 (Peace, Justice and strong institutions) received less attention.

Despite numerous studies, there’s limited evidence of the SDGs being perceived as a valuable tool for making decisions regarding climate action. Firstly, many of the existing studies highlight the potential of mitigation actions supporting SDG achievement through theoretical or modelled methods with few empirical studies demonstrating ex-post evaluation of specific interventions. In particular, there is limited literature on trade-offs and understanding of distributional effects for specific groups [ 8 ]. Secondly, a study on mapping SDG interactions of mitigation actions would not necessarily reveal the full picture. For example, urban public transport could show potential synergies with multiple SDGs however, it wouldn’t necessarily provide evidence on whether benefits could accrue to the most vulnerable groups. Similarly, a new urban transit system could have potential synergies with SDGs 3, 6, 9 and 11, however, this would fail to capture the near-term trade-offs e.g. relocation or costs or emissions.

It becomes more challenging when a particular action can result in mixed impacts, presenting both synergies and trade-offs across indicators within the same SDG. For example, while renewable energy can create green employment opportunities (synergy SDG 8 Target 8.5), it remains uncertain whether these jobs will ensure a safe and secure working environment for all workers throughout the supply chain (trade-off SDG 8, target 8.8). Mitigation options often work across sectors and systems and such interactions are not yet fully dealt with in existing studies.

Additionally, there are gaps in studies and available data for various crucial indicators worldwide, [ 6 ] which complicates the comprehensive assessment of comparing these key indicators across different countries, projects or entities. For instance, the Sustainable Development Report 2023 (Includes time-series data for 122 SDG indicators (out of 169 indicators) for 193 UN member states.) which measures progress across indicators for UN member states compiles data for 3 indicators to construct the index for SDG 13—all of which are related to emissions. Adaptation-related indicators are missing. Finally, studies do not cover temporal and spatial dimensions or the status of these interactions for alternate warming scenarios.

What does this mean for the scientific community?

Addressing the gaps identified presents an opportunity to enhance our understanding of progress towards SDGs and reduce missed opportunities [ 9 , 10 ]. Action that takes into account co-impacts can increase efficiency, reduce costs and support early and ambitious climate action, particularly in developing countries where there are simultaneous development priorities [ 11 ].

A business-as-usual approach to understanding mitigation SDG interactions has made progress but this is not enough. Data, indicators and methodologies, resources, the huge scope of SDGs, limitations of capturing non-measurable development dimensions and capacity constraints remain major challenges for in-depth research in this area [ 12 , 13 ]. New research therefore must focus on the SDGs and targets that have received limited attention and find ways to generate and report data ensuring access and transparency. Where specific data is not available, alternative approaches are needed for e.g. establishing reliable assumptions for utilizing proxy data through expert engagement. Developing indices specific to each goal and setting up reporting guidelines is essential for comparing progress. Failure to report the complete set of indicators limits comparability across goals and targets, and risks missing key priority areas.

Future research needs to focus on comprehensive assessments. For example, demonstrating how, where and to what speed and scale the implementation of a particular intervention resulted in synergies or trade-offs and whether these impacts are sustained. Similarly, going beyond acknowledging trade-offs towards a deeper understanding of what the trade-offs are, for which groups and whether and how these were resolved particularly in relation to questions around power and politics. In-depth studies require both time and resources. Funding needs to be directed to interdisciplinary research as well as building capacity of researchers to undertake such assessments. Quantitative studies involving new tools or modeling exercises, if complemented by qualitative approaches, can deliver more useful insights on synergies and trade-offs, particularly in situations where data is limited. Research institutions and universities can contribute by creating standardized templates and guidelines, as well as consistently reporting data using these templates.

Climate change mitigation research relies significantly on Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to provide a comprehensive perspective on the interactions between socio-economic systems and earth systems. Existing models do not fully capture all development dimensions [ 14 ] or climate change adaptation though efforts are underway. Future research can focus on developing SD/G-compatible scenario storylines that prioritize development. More work is needed on variables and assumptions to better incorporate equity and justice issues [ 15 ] Modeling teams need to work closely with experts on various aspects of adaptation and sustainable development, including poverty, urbanisation, human well-being and biodiversity.

In conclusion, research frameworks and practices to assess mitigation SDG interactions are inadequate in their present form. Given the urgency, researchers and funders need to move away from business-as-usual approaches towards more in-depth assessments that significantly advance knowledge.

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20 Years of global climate change governance research: taking stock and moving forward

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• Volume 22 , pages 295–315, ( 2022 )

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• Philipp Pattberg   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1136-7791 1 ,
• Cille Kaiser 1 ,
• Oscar Widerberg 1 &
• Johannes Stripple 1  

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Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state practice and its outcomes, but rather scrutinizes the intricate interactions between the public and the private in governing climate change. This broad trend has also taken center stage within the pages of INEA. Two decades after its establishment, we sketch the main theoretical debates, conceptual innovations and empirical findings on global climate change governance and survey the new generation of climate governance scholarship. In more detail, we sketch how climate governance research has developed into three innovative sub-debates, building on important conceptualizations and critical inquiries of earlier debates. Our aim is not so much to provide an all-encompassing assessment of global climate change governance scholarship in 2022, but rather to illustrate in what important ways current research is different from research in the early phase of INEA, and what we have learned in the process. First, we discuss scholarship on the bottom-up nature of climate governance, developing from earlier ideas on agency beyond the state and the transnationalization of governance arenas. Second, we review contributions that have more systematically engaged with the concept of governance architectures, resulting in a stimulating new academic debate on the characteristics of complex governance systems and the consequences of governance complexity and fragmentation. Third, we note a distinct normative turn in global environmental scholarship in general and global climate governance in particular, associated with question of access, accountability, allocation, fairness, justice and legitimacy. The assessment of each of these debates is centered around questions of effective and legitimate climate governance to counter the climate emergency. Finally, as a way of concluding, we critically reflect on our own scholarly shortcomings and suggest a modest remedy.

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1 Introduction

Over the last 20 years, we have witnessed a gradual transformation of global climate governance, both in terms of substance and focus, from a top-down state-centered international to a more complex multi-actor and multi-level bottom-up transnational arena. In 2008, INEA published an article (Pattberg & Stripple, 2008 ) that conceptualized this shift as the emergence of a transnational climate governance domain, understood as “the gradual institutionalization of a transnational public sphere in world politics, where the establishment of norms and rules and their subsequent implementation are only to a limited extent the result of public agency in the formal sense, but often the outcome of agency beyond the state” (Pattberg & Stripple, 2008 , 369). In this article, we revisit three important arguments about this shift, sketching how the next generation of global climate governance scholarship has engaged with the empirical puzzles and contradictions that started to become increasingly visible more than two decades ago. In more detail, we focus predominantly on research that has been published in this journal, without ignoring important climate-related research published outside INEA. We identify three distinct of sub-themes of global climate governance research that have emerged over the last two decades and have prominently been pursued within the pages of this journal. Next to providing an account of the conceptual and theoretical innovations related to transnational climate governance, we are in particular interested in the lessons learned about effective interventions, approaches and institutions. As we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, we are taking stock of our knowledge about the promises and pitfalls of transnational climate governance.

The first sub-theme is agency beyond the state (Nasiritousi et al., 2014 ). Scholars such as Hall and Biersteker ( 2002 ) and Ruggie ( 2004 ) have noted early on that public policy could be pursued by a range of non-state actors, and that consequently, the authoritative allocation of values within societies was increasingly taking place “beyond the confines of national boundaries, and a small, but growing fraction of norms and rules governing relations among social actors of all types […] are based in and pursued through transnational channels and processes” (Ruggie, 2004 , 521). From these conceptual beginnings, a fruitful scholarly debate on the groundswell of non-state climate action has emerged, now occupying center stage in climate governance research (Bäckstrand et al., 2017 ; Hermwille, 2018 ).

Another development is the increased attention paid to the broader governance system and the use of insights from complexity theory (Orsini et al., 2020 ). A first generation of governance scholarship has analyzed the conditions for effectiveness of international environmental regimes, including the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol, while a second generation put emphasis on interplay and interlinkages between international institutions. Around 2008, a third generation of scholarship was starting to pay attention to the systemic level of governance, focusing conceptually on ideas such as fragmentation and cohesion (Biermann et al., 2009 ). In fact, Pattberg and Stripple ( 2008 , 385) called for more research in this field when they argued that “we need to further our knowledge about the systemic interaction between the international and transnational global climate arena and the possibility for effective and equitable governance, taking into account a growing number of agents in a multiplicity of institutional contexts.” Based on these fundaments, a lively academic debate emerged on the appropriate concepts and methods to analyze the system level of environmental governance. We will portray the main insights from this sub-field under the heading ‘from fragmentation to complexity.’

A third notable development concerns what we refer to as a normative turn in global environmental governance research. Concepts such as allocation and access (Gupta & Lebel, 2020 ), fairness and equity (van den Berg et al. 2016 ), and legitimacy and accountability (Dombrowsky, 2010 ) have become widely discussed as key ingredients for the sustainability transition. Already in the 1990s, Rosenau ( 1997 , 39) attempted to analyze novel spheres of authority beyond the state as the building blocks of “a new ontology where states are treated as only one of the many sources of authority” (Pattberg & Stripple, 2008 , 372). A central question then was to understand how domestic concepts such as ‘democratic accountability’ could be applied to the realm of transnational politics (Dingwerth, 2007 ).

Finally, after having discussed three distinct conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions that emerged within the pages of INEA over the last two decades, we focus on renewed attention to the politics of climate change, building on the observation that the predominant market-based ideology visible in policy instruments such as emission trading is problematic. Whereas initial scholarship provided some useful reflections on ‘climate governance beyond the state,’ we now need to concede that in order to follow the climate deeper into social, cultural and material realms, we need new concepts and critical perspectives. Consequently, we engage in some self-reflection on the state of global climate governance scholarship as a way of conclusion.

2 The global climate change governance arena: from agency beyond the state to bottom-up climate action

In the beginning of the 2000s, the “predominant perspective on global climate governance” was biased toward interstate negotiations (Pattberg & Stripple, 2008 , 369). However, seeds of change were already in the ground, promising a broader, more inclusive perspective on agency. For instance, in an editorial for INEA on the institutional design of global environmental governance, Vellinga and colleagues (2002, 294) wrote that one could imagine “a system that is perhaps beyond the current United Nations thinking and makes room for not only state actors but also civil society, industry and other international and national players,” but that “it is not clear what such a system would look like.” Despite the budding interest in agency ‘beyond the state,’ INEA contains few articles from the early 2000’s elaborating on how such a system could look like and what actors it should involve. Research interest in non-state actors (e.g., cities, NGOs and companies) primarily pertained to their role and influence on the multilateral negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as lobbyists and advocates for or against domestic climate action (e.g., Brandt & Svendsen, 2004 ), and not as autonomous agents and governors in their own right.

In 2008, Pattberg and Stripple questioned the research bias toward interstate negotiations and pointed to an ongoing “transnationalization” of global climate governance. The number of transnational governance arrangements—where non-state actors play an important role, sometimes in conjunction with public actors—such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and multi-stakeholder partnerships was growing rapidly. Consequently, researchers should expand their focus to include “agency beyond the state.” Fast forward to 2021, The Conference of the Parties (COPs) and the intersessional meetings to the UNFCCC remain important fieldwork sites for collecting data and carrying out research on, for instance, environmental NGOs (Dombrowski, 2010 ); indigenous peoples (Schroeder, 2010 ); or youth participation (Thew, 2018 ), as well as broader questions of non-state actor participation in the negotiations (e.g., Nasiritousi & Linnér, 2014 ; Nasiritousi et al., 2016 ). However, the bias among global climate governance scholars toward interstate negotiations is waning and yielding to more pluralist perspectives. In this context, the coming section highlights three themes with regards to research on transnational actors and institutions in climate governance: (1) the expanding universe of transnational governance initiatives; (2) the expanding institutional space for transnational initiatives and non-state actors in the UNFCCC; and, (3) the impact and effectiveness of transnational climate governance on mitigation and adaptation.

2.1 The expanding universe of transnational governance initiatives

The first theme concerns the rapid growth in the number of new agents in transnational climate governance, in particular the growth in number of new initiatives. It is difficult to estimate the exact population of initiatives and agents, but when Bulkeley and colleagues ( 2012 , 2014) finished a major study on transnational climate governance in 2012, they found 60 initiatives. Nine years later, the Climate Initiatives Platform—a UN supported database—lists 269 initiatives, representing a fourfold increase in the number of initiatives since 2012 (UN Environment, 2021 ). The emerging picture of a rapid growth in initiatives is confirmed by more specialized databases, e.g., on transnational adaptation initiatives or transnational city initiatives (e.g., Dzebo, 2019 ; Papin, 2019 ). Widerberg and colleagues (2016) found that nearly 10,750 cities, regions, companies, foundations, NGOs and other non-state and sub-national actors engaged in 89 transnational climate governance initiatives, and more recently, Hsu, Yeo, et al. ( 2020 ) released a dataset with over 10,000 cities that participate in transnational initiatives focusing on urban climate governance. The expanding universe of transnational initiatives has happened in parallel to a growth in international initiatives (between states). Keohane and Victor ( 2011 , 12) has likened the process to a “Cambrian explosion,” alluding to a geological event some 540 million years ago resulting in a rapid increase in variety of species. The result is a dense institutional architecture of global climate governance marked by overlapping norms, discourses, and memberships (Widerberg, 2016 ; Zelli, 2011 ).

2.2 The new structure of global climate governance

The second theme concerns structure of the international climate regime complex, and the role of the UNFCCC in particular. Much research capacity has been devoted to scrutinizing alternative international arenas to the UNFCCC. The now defunct Asia–Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP) is a case-in-point, as countries skeptical to the Kyoto Protocol (e.g., US and Australia) created a new partnership that was generally perceived as a potential threat to the UNFCCC’s authority (e.g., Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen & van Asselt, 2009 ). Researchers and other observers were worried that countries would engage in ‘forum shopping’ or ‘forum shifting’ (Kellow, 2012 ), challenging existing institutions and agreements (Falkner, 2015 ). After COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009 failed to produce a substantive outcome (Dimitrov, 2010 ), governments and the then new UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres initiated a change process to the institutional structure of the UNFCCC. They were supported by political scientists and economists making theoretical and empirical arguments for why a “global solution” and a “uniform approach” was likely to fail; instead one should opt for “bottom-up” and “polycentric” structures (Ostrom, 2010 ; Verbruggen, 2011 ; Victor, 2011 ). The change process came to fruition in the Paris Agreement in 2015, where governments agreed on a new structure to international climate governance, moving from what Hale ( 2016 ) calls a ‘“regulatory” model of binding, negotiated emissions targets to a “catalytic and facilitative” model that seeks to create conditions under which actors progressively reduce their emissions through coordinated policy shifts. Suddenly there was space for alternative arenas where countries could pursue their interests. The Paris Agreement, in particular the decision of COP21, also embraced a more visible role for non-state and sub-national actors, referred to as “non-Party stakeholders.” Parties to the convention were explicitly encouraged to collaborate with non-Party stakeholders; non-Party stakeholders were encouraged to share data with the UNFCCC via the Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action platform (NAZCA); an annual high-level event was launched, building on the Lima-Paris Action Agenda set up in 2014; and, two “champions” were appointed to strengthen the connections between Parties and non-Party stakeholders (Hsu et al., 2018 ; Widerberg, 2017 ). The Paris Agreement and the COP21 decision thus further blurred the boundaries between international and the transnational spheres of global climate governance. The current institutional structure of global climate governance is thus marked by what Pattberg and Stripple call “the inadequacy of the public/private dichotomy in political theory” (2008, 384), as the role of governments in addressing climate change globally is changing and a more diverse set of actors are engaging in climate action, often via hybrid and multi-stakeholder constellations.

2.3 The impact of transnational governance initiatives and non-state actors on global climate governance

The third theme concerns the impacts of a changing climate regime complex. Theorizing about how non-state actors and transnational governance initiatives are supposed to influence global climate governance is a central topic in research on impact (Widerberg and Pattberg 2015 ). For example, are non-state actors and transnational governance initiatives there to instill confidence, build momentum and support governments in taking ambitious climate actions (indirect influence), or are they to be seen as independent actors in their own right, mitigating and adapting to climate change (direct influence) (Widerberg, 2017 )? The two pathways for influence resonate well with Downie’s ( 2016 , 741) observation that there is a “two-level” game frame (referring to Putnam’s theory on the relationship between national and international politics), where “[t]he preferences of non-state actors are accounted for through the domestic polity”, and a system-level perspective, where international negotiations is one of many arenas for non-state and sub-national actors to influence governments. Hermwille ( 2018 ) brings both perspectives together by analyzing interdependencies between the international and the transnational levels of global climate governance using structuration theory (Giddens, 1984 ). The idea is to foster feed-back loops between the national, transnational and international levels of climate governance to create a momentum toward increased action.

The second topic has been on how to measure impact empirically. As GHG emissions continue to rise unabated on a global level, it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that transnational initiatives have done little to break the negative trend. However, few studies actually attempt (and succeed) to isolate and measure the impact of transnational initiative on emission reduction (but see Hsu, Tan, et al., 2020 and Hale et al, 2021 , for an overview). The literature instead understand term ‘impact’ in a multifaceted way where effectiveness, i.e., whether the proliferation of initiatives and actors, and the ‘bottom-up’ structure actually leads to reduced greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation, is but one aspect and most authors suggest a separation between output, outcome, and impact level effectiveness (Chan et al., 2018 ; Dzebo, 2019 ). One measure of impact is to what extent countries have included transnational initiatives and non-state actors in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). A study by Hsu, Brandt, et al. ( 2019 ) demonstrates that this is generally not the case, however, developing countries are more prone to mention cities, regions and companies in their NDCs compared to developed countries, in particular in the context of adaptation. Studies that estimate impact at the level of GHG emissions focus on potential impact, i.e., what hypothetically could happen if an initiative reaches its goals. Researchers have used newly available data for assessing their impact on global climate governance, mitigation and adaptation, and developed new protocols and methodologies for streamlining the research efforts (e.g., Hsu, Höhne, et al., 2019 ; Lui et al., 2020 ). A recurring challenge to understanding the impact of transnational climate governance initiatives is the lack of information necessary to assess important aspects such as goal-attainment (Widerberg & Stripple, 2016 ). Other types of impact have been suggested by, for instance, Jacobs ( 2016 ) argues that a coalition of civil society actors contributed to the successful outcome of COP15 in Paris, by putting pressure on governments to reach an agreement. In sum, despite convincing evidence that the transnationalization of global climate governance has accelerated, we know little about its impact on halting and adapting to dangerous climate change; however, a broader perspective on effectiveness suggests that transnational initiatives do have impact in various ways.

Looking ahead, the transnationalization of global climate governance seems to be accelerating rather than decelerating. More companies, investors, cities, regions, faith-based organizations and other non-state and sub-national actors are making public commitments and joining transnational initiatives on climate mitigation and adaptation. The UNFCCC is prolonging mandates for the High-level champions and expanding the NAZCA database. Civil society organizations and advocacy groups such as Fridays for Future and the Extinction Rebellion are ramping up pressure on governments and other actors to take ambitious climate action. For researchers and other observers, the question of effectiveness is an elusive one. On the one hand, conclusive evidence is scarce whether individual initiatives and actions have led to reduced GHG emissions or concrete adaptation. On the other hand, it is plausible to assume that transnational climate action contributed to the adoption of the Paris Agreement), and that in an counter-factual scenario—where multi-stakeholder partnerships and non-state and sub-national climate action are absent—the pressure on governments to take on ambitious climate goals and policies would have been lower.

3 From governance fragmentation to complexity

Another key innovation in global environmental governance scholarship is the focus on the broader institutional system of environmental governance under the heading of ‘governance architecture.’ Biermann and colleagues defined governance architecture in their 2009 seminal article as “…the overarching system of public and private institutions that are valid or active in a given issue area of world politics” (Biermann et al., 2009 , 15) and introduced ‘fragmentation’ as a central analytical category. Questions relating to the role and relevance of fragmentation of governance architectures, its drivers and implications and subsequent management options in and beyond the climate governance arena gained prominence over the last decade (see for example van Asselt & Zelli, 2014 ). However, researchers are increasingly realizing the limitations of established analytical frameworks and ontologies to study governance architectures and are consequently searching for alternative framings. Complexity has emerged in recent years as one such an overall integrative framing for fragmentation research. In this section, we first summarize some generic findings of the fragmentation literature (as far as it relates to sustainability and climate change) and second review complexity-informed research on climate governance.

3.1 Fragmented climate governance: key findings

A recent meta-analysis (see Heidingsfelder & Beckman, 2020 ) has screened 134 publications related to fragmentation and sustainability governance and found convergence in the literature mostly around the specific management approaches to fragmentation, identified as coordination, convergence and integration, and meta-governance. Beyond the important question of how to manage fragmentation (see for example Zelli & van Asselt, 2013 ), other issues have been addressed as well. Relevant academic contributions have been made over the last two decades relating to: emergence and drivers of fragmentation (e.g., Oh & Matsuoka, 2015), the empirical pervasiveness, depth and relevance of fragmentation (e.g., Pattberg & Widerberg, 2020 ), and its implications (e.g., Hackmann, 2012 ). We will briefly summarize relevant contributions in each of these areas.

In an early application of the fragmentation concept in empirical analysis, Hof and Colleagues ( 2009 , 58) study various possible climate governance architectures using a quantitative modeling approach related to effectiveness and distribution. Their study concludes that “stabilising GHG concentrations at low levels is generally more costly in a fragmented regime, either because ambitious reduction targets must be achieved by a smaller number of countries or because emission reductions do not take place where it is cheapest to do so” (Hof et al., 2009 , 58). This study serves as an important reminder that fragmentation is not only a conceptual innovation, but also allows for precise quantitative analysis when it comes to expected outcomes.

Other studies have focused on linking fragmentation to sub-optimal governance performance and the subsequent question of fragmentation management. Hackmann ( 2012 ), for example, analyzes the emerging governance architecture of climate change in international shipping, hypothesizing “that the degree and the characteristics of governance fragmentation have a crucial impact on the effectiveness and performance of a governance system” (Hackmann, 2012 , 87). The study in particular highlights the role that institutional fragmentation with regards to nesting overlaps between decision-making systems and norm conflicts play in producing sub-optimal governance outcomes (Hackmann, 2012 , 100).

On the important question of fragmentation management, Gupta et al. ( 2015 ) illustrate the central role that multi-stakeholder partnerships play as ‘bridge organizations’ in managing governance fragmentation. Empirically situated in at the nexus of forest and climate governance, the study analyzes the increased institutional fragmentation in the REDD + domain and interrogates possible management approaches, in particular related to enhancing transparency, participation, knowledge sharing and coordination (Gupta et al., 2015 , 370). The authors (2015, 371) highlight in particular the role that political contestation and the broader normative conflicts that shape the overall global environmental governance architecture play in explaining fragmentation management and its limitations. As a consequence, a robust finding of the ‘managing fragmentation ‘ literature in global environmental governance is the recommendation to focus on improving the management of fragmentation as opposed to redesigning governance structures to reduce fragmentation, as the latter are affected by system-level political dynamics (see Zürn & Faude, 2013 ).

Another group of studies has attempted to shed light on the dynamic interactions, or interplay, among the many institutions, both international and transnational, that aim at governing global environmental change. For example, Gomar ( 2016 , 526) scrutinizes the factors “determining the quality of interplay management and the achievement” in the international biodiversity governance cluster, comprising of the Convention for Biological Diversity along with five specialized international regimes. Hoch and Colleagues ( 2019 ) are also interested in interplay, this time related to international climate governance. Utilizing the typology of Biermann and Colleagues ( 2009 ) that distinguished between synergistic, cooperative and conflictive fragmentation, the study analyzes the interplay between the Paris Agreement, the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol and CORSIA (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation). One important finding is that equal stringency reinforced cooperative fragmentation (Hoch et al., 2019 , 611).

Yet another line of research is represented by Oh and Matsuoka ( 2017 ), who scrutinize the emergence of institutional fragmentation in the climate change arena from a constructivist perspective. A key observation here is that fragmentation can arise out of normative contestations of key international norms, often motivated by strategic considerations. The example explored in Oh and Matsuoka ( 2017 ) is the establishment of the Asia–Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP), under the leadership of the USA, building a counter-narrative to the mandatory emission reduction approach of the Kyoto Protocol (KP). Earlier work on the APP published in INEA by Karlsson-Vinkhuizen and van Asselt ( 2009 ) has reached similar conclusions, highlighting also the implications fragmentation has for effectiveness and legitimacy of global climate governance.

Finally, research has also attempted to measure the fragmentation of global governance architectures. Building on a standardized methodology, Pattberg and colleagues have provided measurements for the degree of institutional fragmentation for the issue areas of climate change, energy, biodiversity, forestry and fisheries (see Widerberg et al., 2016 ; Negacz et al., 2020 ; Pattberg & Widerberg, 2020 ).

3.2 Governance complexes and governance complexity

After having discussed scholarship building on the initial interest for questions around governance architecture discussed in this journal (see, e.g., Pattberg & Stripple, 2008 ), we now turn to a related debate that has unfortunately received much less attention in the pages of INEA: the interest in climate governance complexes and complexity. While undoubtedly there has been progress in the study of international institutions, in particular by moving ‘beyond the state’ (see Sect.  5 ) and by analyzing interplay and interlinkages (see Kalaba et al., 2014 ), little attention has been paid to system-wide interactions and the emerging complexity in and of global environmental governance in general and climate governance in particular. While scholars have noted “the presence of nested, partially overlapping, and parallel international regimes that are not hierarchically ordered” (Alter & Meunier, 2009 ) and referred to these structures as “regime complexes” (Keohane & Victor, 2011 ; Raustiala & Victor, 2004 ), few scholars have attempted to utilize insights from complexity theory for the study of global environmental governance in general and climate governance in particular. However, this situation is now changing.

In a recent forum in International Studies Review, Orsini and Colleagues ( 2020 ) argue for embracing the complexity of world politics analytically, by utilizing insights from the broad school of complexity science (for a similar argument, see Zelli et al., 2020 ). For Orsini et al., ( 2020 , 1011), world politics, including sustainability and climate change, is best addressed as a complex system, with open boundaries, emergent properties, and self-organizing adaptive behavior (see also Kim, 2014 , for an important contribution). Consequently, analyzing governance systems (i.e., governance architectures) as complex systems has two important implications (see Orsini et al., 2020 , 1022). First, the focus on individual institutions gives way to studying interactions and interconnections, i.e., the bio-physical/social nexus between governance approaches. Second, when evaluating global governance systems, analysts need to take into account the complexity of the system. In other words: system level performance is not the same as additive performance.

Beyond being used as a generalized description of reality (and then often confused with complicated), complexity has rarely been applied to global environmental governance in general and climate governance in particular. A noteworthy exception is Pattberg and Widerberg’s ( 2019 , 2021 ) attempt to show that the global climate governance architecture has properties of a complex system and should consequently be analyzed using insights from complexity science. Taking seriously the implications that derive from properties of complex systems, such as nonlinearity and emergence, the prospects for management and orchestration (Chan & Amling, 2019 ) of governance architectures in a top-down fashion are slim, given that learning, adaptation, self-organization, and feedbacks are central to complex systems. This in turn calls into question overly optimistic plans to reduce conflicts and increase synergies within the ever-expanding field of global climate governance.

4 The normative turn and global climate change governance

The growing role of transnationalism in GEG opens up questions not only of effectiveness, but also of equity (Pattberg & Stripple, 2008 ). While the increasing fragmentation and diversification of global governance systems is in part a direct and potentially positive response to issues of uneven access, allocation and inclusion, it simultaneously has the potential to exacerbate these very injustices (Okereke, 2018 ). The increasing complexity of GEG architectures at large, and global climate change governance in particular, therefore point at a growing need to revisit those more normative questions pertaining to issues of equity and justice.

While the notion of ‘normative GEG scholarship’ does not do justice to the breadth and diversity of existing discussions, a concise overview of the state-of-the-art necessitates an umbrella term for the sake of clarity. Indeed, in their study into the diverging conceptualizations and operationalizations of ‘justice’ in GEG scholarship, Dirth et al. ( 2020 ) emphasize that this sub-field in environmental scholarship engages with a rich but complex vocabulary. Key concepts include, but are not limited to, justice, equity, and fairness (e.g., Dirth et al., 2020 ), access and allocation (e.g., Gupta & Lebel, 2010 ), and accountability and legitimacy (e.g., Biermann & Gupta, 2011 ).

4.1 Equity and effectiveness at a crossroads

Whether the growing attention to issues of justice is beneficial to the effectiveness of governance initiatives, however, has been the subject of deep-seated disagreements. At the turn of the century, Kemfert and Tol ( 2002 ) identified a gap in the literature concerning the interplay between efficiency and equity in GHG reduction efforts. In his study into emissions trading under the Kyoto Protocol, Bohm ( 2002 ) demonstrates how the deliberate facilitation of developing country participation in emissions trading schemes is beneficial to cost-effective GHG reduction. Barrett and Stavins ( 2003 ) argue against this, instead maintaining that cost-effectiveness and widespread participation are oftentimes conflictive. Whether equity should be treated as a means to the end of effectiveness or vice versa, therefore, is a contended topic of discussion. “For many regime analysts”, argue Vellinga and Colleagues ( 2002 , 296), “environmental governance should not attempt to solve all issues in one go.”

Indeed, in 2010, Posner and Weisbach argued that a radical orientation on distributive and intergenerational justice comes at the expense of effective climate change action. ) carried this argument forward in his keynote address at the 2016 Berlin Conference on Transformative Global Climate Governance ‘après Paris.’ He additionally argued that scholars ought to prioritize research into real-world political action over “articulating a normative-philosophical view of ethical climate policy” (Keohane, 2016a ).

In response, 18 scholars from diverse institutions across the world wrote a plea to encourage more, not less, research on equity and justice in GEG scholarship (Klinsky et al., 2017 ). First and foremost, Klinsky and Colleagues ( 2017 , 171) argue that neglecting issues of equity and justice is in direct conflict with the research community’s obligation “to do intellectually rigorous work on issues affecting human wellbeing.” They further maintain that political research requires an understanding of existing interpretations of- and claims to justice, not least when assessing trade-offs, and that normative considerations are not necessarily at odds with effective climate action. In his response to this plea, Keohane ( 2016b ) clarified that he agrees that academic research into equity and climate change is important, but nevertheless remains “cautious” to emphasize justice —an end he believes to be unrealistic.

4.2 Toward justice: potentialities and pitfalls of “green growth”

These ongoing disagreements did not restrain the expansion of normative scholarship since the launch of INEA. Noteworthy topics of inquiry include the energy transition (Carley & Konisky, 2020 ; Meadowcroft, 2009 ), the cap-and-trade system upheld by the UNFCCC regime (Méjean et al., 2015 ), the distributive practice of determining carbon emission rights (Caney, 2009 ; Duus-Otterström & Hjorthen, 2019 ) and carbon trading and -taxation practices (Aldred, 2012 ; Hammar & Jagers, 2007 ; Jagers & Hammar, 2009 ). The normative considerations associated with these practices are embedded within wider concerns over neoliberal and/or market-regulated climate change governance practices, including climate voluntarism, business environmentalism and transnationalism at large (Castro, 2016 ; Okereke, 2018 ). Evidently, tensions between economic growth and efficiency on the one hand and the pursuit of environmental and ecological justice on the other are a recurring theme in normative GEG scholarship.

INEA explored these tensions in detail in a special issue on environmental justice and the pursuit of a ‘green economy’ (Okereke & Ehresman, 2015 ). Described as a potential ‘paradigm shift’ (Bowen & Fankhauser, 2011 ), defendants of this model pursue economic development practices that are environmentally and ecologically sustainable and climate-resilient. Whether this ‘green economy’ and environmental justice are symbiotic, however, remains uncertain. Studies into labor union environmentalism (Stevis & Felli, 2015 ), the salience of ‘green growth’ in marginalized urban areas (McKendry & Janos, 2015 ) and socio-environmental activism in the Amazon (Bratman, 2015 ) all point at a need to more carefully consider all dimensions of justice, as well as the potentiality of the ‘green growth’-narrative as a means to override marginalized peoples’ claims to justice.

4.3 Understanding equity post-Paris

Not long after the publication of this special issue, the 2015 Paris Agreement proved decisive in determining the future directions of normative GEG scholarship. Some believe the Paris Agreement, given its departure from the developed-developing dichotomy and its emphasis on voluntarism and universalism, marks the beginning of a “post-equity” era (found in Klinsky et al., 2017 , 170). Still, Okereke and Coventry ( 2016 , 846–7) are cautious of the regime’s “trend toward voluntary commitments” and maintain that “suggestions that the new pledge and review system has sidestepped the contentious justice debates […] cannot but be described as simply naïve and wishful thinking.” The Agreement’s simultaneous emphases on climate justice on the one hand and market mechanisms on the other have also been the subject of scrutiny (Shrivastava & Bhaduri, 2019 ).

INEA addresses these concerns in their special issue on ‘Achieving 1.5 °C and Climate Justice’ (Dooley et al., 2018 ). For instance, Lahn ( 2018 , 30) identifies a distinct tension between “the common temperature goal of 1.5 °C, and the differentiated goal of equity […] as two parallel objectives.” Particularly, striking is how the Paris Agreement redirects the normative narrative through its Pledge and Review system, within which countries ought to defend the ‘fairness’ of their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) in light of their capabilities and overall contribution to the problem (see Winkler et al., 2018 ). Holz, Kartha, and Athanasiou (2018) identify an evident ambition gap, in particular on the part of wealthier countries, and contend that “dual obligations” for both wealthier and poorer countries are the only way forward to align differentiations in NDCs with achieving the overall 1.5 °C goal in time, again emphasizing the tensions between equity and effectiveness.

Another line of research explores the normative implications of the potential ‘technologies of the future’ including geoengineering (Faran & Olsson, 2018 ; Flegal & Gupta, 2018 ) and negative emissions technologies (NETs) (Dooley & Kartha, 2018 ). The risks and ethical ‘grey areas’ associated with these technologies are manifold and warrant further research. According to Tallberg and colleagues ( 2018 , 244–5), the global governance community faces a distinct tension between two dominant legal norms, namely ‘precaution’ (for the potentially harmful consequences of these technologies) and ‘harm minimisation’ (of the detrimental impacts induced by global warming). In addition, as Faran and Olsson ( 2018 , 66) point out, “the question is not only how we decide on the use of particular forms of climate engineering, but who decides.” Indeed, Biermann and Möller ( 2019 ) identify a distinct underrepresentation of developing countries in climate engineering negotiations.

Nevertheless, geoengineering solutions could serve to correct lasting imbalances in the access to environmental goods (including the opportunity to secure basic human needs) and the global allocation of these goods (Gupta & Lebel, 2010 ). A recently published special INEA issue on ‘Access and Allocation in Earth System Governance’ (Gupta & Lebel, 2020 ) reveals, however, just how systemic the forces behind these inequities are. Global trade and investment schemes, industry-related financial flows, and other forms of transnational and market-regulated governance prove considerably decisive in determining the access to and allocation of environmental goods and burdens (Gonenc et al., 2020 ; Gupta et al., 2020 ; Kalfagianni, 2014 ). This, again, points at a need to integrate all dimensions of justice in our assessment of environmental and climate justice, and, empirically, highlights the necessity of a closer integration of the Paris Agreement on the one hand, and the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals on the other (Ivanova et al., 2020 ).

4.4 Normative GEG: a research agenda

What the special issue edited by Gupta and Lebel ( 2020 ) also highlights, however, are the notable advances made in normative GEG research over the years (Kalfagianni & Meisch, 2020 ). Nevertheless, many scholars maintain that the overall engagement with issues of justice on the part of the global research community remains relatively marginal and warrants more research, in particular on those more substantive questions of justice (Dirth et al., 2020 ; Kalfagianni & Meisch, 2020 ). This includes more rigorous work on the discrepancies in existing conceptualizations and operationalizations of those concepts central to normative GEG debates (see Klinsky & Dowlabati, 2009 ; Schlosberg, 2013 ; Dirth et al., 2020 ; Kalfagianni & Meisch, 2020 ).

A new research framework proposed by Biermann and Kalfagianni ( 2020 ) is a likely contender to carry this line of research forward. Recognizing the diverse interpretations of ‘justice’ in GEG, the authors propose to adopt the notion of ‘planetary justice’ over conceptions of, among others, environmental justice. The overall aim is to redirect the discussion “from a normative debate on planetary justice (‘what is just?’) toward an empirical debate on what conceptualizations of justice different actors in global environmental politics actually support” (Biermann & Kalfagianni, 2020 , 2). The question remains whether future research efforts sufficiently take into consideration potential trade-offs between justice and effectiveness (Klinsky et al., 2017 ) and succeed in refraining from treating either of the two as ends in themselves. Nevertheless, treating the study of equity and justice as an empirical project instead of a normative one might provide common ground between Keohane ( 2016a ) and Klinsky et al. ( 2017 ) that is beneficial for carrying this line of research forward.

Of particular importance is to direct more attention to transnational actors as potential facilitators of (or obstacles to) a positive relationship between equity and effectiveness. While transnational regimes indeed offer more space for inclusion, it is imperative to remember that the turn to transnational governance, as it has been observed across multiple governance domains, can be seen as the result of neo-liberalization (Bulkeley et al., 2014 , chapters 3–4), which, according to Okereke ( 2018 , 331) is ethically “not compatible with more radical interpretations of climate justice.” That transnational actors have been effective in reorienting climate change governance both horizontally and vertically, thereby considerably reshaping a previously predominantly top-down system is certain (Bulkeley et al., 2014 , chapter 8). That this happens equitably, is not. Whether the transnational governance arena will become a space where effective and equitable climate change mitigation become naturally symbiotic, then, remains for future research to discern.

5 Conclusions: the road beyond ‘climate governance beyond the state’

Having discussed three distinct conceptual, theoretical and empirical contributions that emerged on the topic of global climate governance within the pages of INEA, we now engage in some introspective reflection to identify areas in need of theoretical attention in the decade to come. Twenty years ago, during the early 2000s, scholars coming from the discipline of International Relations (IR) discovered ‘climate governance beyond the state,’ i.e., governing accomplished by a range of actors, such as insurance companies, administrative certification institutions, standard-setting organizations, networks of cites, multi-stakeholder partnerships for energy, and divestments movements. IR’s journey ‘beyond the state’ has been a productive one, with lots of important discoveries, some discussed in this contribution. But as with many journeys, some of the most profound discoveries relate to ourselves. As you travel, if you are not really sure where you are heading, you will at least know more about where you were coming from.

As IR had left the sovereign state, the entities it encountered ‘beyond the state’ were depicted to be ‘non-state.’ This simple stating of what the entities were not—they were not states—illuminated as much as it obscured. IR went on its travel with some conceptual baggage (assumptions about sovereign authority) that it had to carry. Eventually, IR could offload some of that weight and learned a lot about the diversity and multiplicity of non-state actors. A rich and variegated account of the realm of non-state governance emerged (e.g., Bulkeley et al., 2014 ). In the face of the stalemate in the intergovernmental negotiations after Kyoto, a lot of hope was invested in the possibility for cities, citizen groups, and corporations to deliver in the absence of the state (Hoffman, 2011 ). Of course, corporate responses were also met with large suspicion. Already at the Rio Summit in 1992, when transnational companies were recognized as key actors in the battle to save the planet, Hildyard ( 1993 ) commented that this was akin to putting the “foxes in charge of the chickens.” Consequently, the question about corporations became a question not just about the agency of particular non-state actors, but a larger question about structure: can capitalism effectively respond to climate change? Could new alliances and coalitions in the private realm initiate a new form of capitalism that is able to deliver growth on a low-carbon basis (Newell & Paterson, 2010 )? In an influential book, Klein ( 2014 ) argues that capitalism can only be fundamentally changed, if the civil-sphere (climate activism and social justice movements) unites behind an alternative worldview embedded in “interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy” (Klein, 2014 ,462). Klein’s argument that ‘everything must change’ is thus not just about corporate actors and governments, but about the culture of the civil-sphere, what we can hope for and what we can demand from ourselves.

In parallel to the question of corporate actors, other fundamental theoretical issues have also come to the fore. While early writings on ‘climate change beyond the state’ traced the ways in which climate change started to become a matter of concern for more actors than environment ministries at international environmental summits, certain assumption about ‘the international’ as a particular space has limited IRs capacity to follow the climate deeper into social, cultural and material realms (Bulkeley et al., 2016 ). Today climate change is everywhere and is “an idea as ubiquitous and powerful in today’s social discourses as are the ideas of democracy, terrorism, or nationalism” (Hulme, 2009 , 322). There is hardly any site in the contemporary world that is untouched by this idea, from how forests are managed, to what goes on in the farm and in the reconfiguration of urban environments. It is right there in the financial circuits, in plastics production facilities, clothing retailers and in public transport. It is unavoidable in discourses of holiday travel and has left its imprint on the varieties of milk at the local café. Hence, it is no longer meaningful to draw neat boundaries around the international politics of climate change as something which occurs, e.g., in the UN, and the everyday practices of eating, traveling, or shopping (Methmann et al., 2013 ).

In their recent book, Adler and Pouliot ( 2011 ) invite students of international relations to view world politics through the lens of its manifold practices. Their approach is about tracing the “doing” of world politics in and on the world. But what does such an approach mean for students of climate governance in the early 2020s? While the broadening of climate governance that emerge during the early 2000s was useful, it also tended to obscure the ways in which climate change has emerged everywhere. The question now becomes if the concept of climate governance can still describe and capture how we increasingly govern ourselves and others in relation to climate change. Climate governance, when approached too much in a general fashion, risks becoming an empty concept. Is it the same kind of governance that recur across sites? Or are these sites governing the climate in distinctive ways? Various forms of critical scholarship have argued that the manifold of sites involved in the governing of climate change cannot be brought into the same view. The politics will be different in each of them because power in intrinsic and emergent within those sites and not a resource to be deployed from the outside (Stripple & Bulkeley, 2014 ).

While global climate governance scholarship has excelled in engaging a much broader range of actors, it has been less focused on revisiting fundamental assumptions about how governing is accomplished in the absence of the state. A renewed engagement with such issues requires, however, that fundamental assumptions about power and authority are brought back into the foreground. Rather than assuming that particular actors or institutions hold power, as if it was a material resource, scholars should instead elucidate “how different locales are constituted as authoritative and powerful, and how different agents are assembled with specific powers, and how different domains are constituted as governable and administrable” (Dean, 1999 , 29).

Traditions within social science that draw on structural and productive theories of power suggest that we should instead view governing as a practice and analyze the techniques that work through diffuse social relations to create, sustain, or disrupt particular socio-technical orders (Barnett & Duvall, 2005 ; Murray Li, 2007 ). If greenhouse gas emissions are produced and embodied in processes that work through global production chains, circuits of investment, the provision and use of infrastructure networks, and the consumption of a range of goods and services, then IR need to be prepared for new encounters (Bulkeley et al., 2018 ). Developing new accounts of climate governance requires, for example, utilizing analytical perspectives that highlight the material and spatial essences of these sites, scales, and socio-technical systems (Bridge et al., 2013 ; Rice, 2010 ).

While the question of power is central to how contemporary forms of governance emerge, new kinds of scholarship have also started to explore the power of visions of post-fossil futures to shape action in the present (e.g., Jasanoff & Kim, 2015 ; Yusoff & Gabrys, 2011 ). To grasp the role of imagination in the making of climate politics, a growing group of scholars are turning their attention to the concept of imaginaries (e.g., Hajer & Versteeg, 2019 ; Oomen et al., 2021 ; Pelzer & Versteeg, 2019 ). Overall, however, the process of translating imagined futures into action remains relatively underexplored and should therefore become a focus for future research.

To conclude, 20 years after the publication of the first issue of INEA, global climate governance scholarship has developed from a niche to a thriving school of thought within the broader confines of global environmental governance. In this article, we have highlighted three contemporary debates that have taken shape within the pages of INEA: agency beyond the state, governance complexity, and the normative turn in climate governance scholarship. What have we now learned for the next critical decades of climate governance practice in terms of the role and relevance of climate action? A short summary such as this one cannot do justice to the varied research conducted on the three themes discussed in this article. A singular answer to the question ‘does global climate governance work?’ is hard to give. Nonetheless, what seems to be emerging across the three research arenas sketched here is an understanding that focusing on the individual agency of a certain actor, the performance of a distinct governance arrangement, or the question of legitimacy and accountability of specific governance instruments employed in the fight against climate change falls short understanding global climate governance for what it is. A complex and adaptive system that is changing in a nonlinear and often quite unpredictable fashion. To successfully assess the problem-solving as well as normative performance of climate governance today, including important sub-questions such as the effectiveness of carbon markets, we need to embrace a holistic perspective on governance. A next generation of global climate governance scholarship will need to advance both new tools and concepts that allow comprehensive studies to be undertaken, while at the same time being attentive to the particularities, materialities and subjectivities of/in the contemporary world. At the time of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, we might not have solved all governance-related questions of climate change; what we have achieved, however, is a robust understanding of its structural features, its key agents, the scope conditions for success, as well as the limits of our ability to predict and steer in light of new insights from complexity research. All in all, this is a solid achievement.

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Pattberg, P., Kaiser, C., Widerberg, O. et al. 20 Years of global climate change governance research: taking stock and moving forward. Int Environ Agreements 22 , 295–315 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-022-09568-5

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Roz Pidcock

Which of the many thousands of papers on climate change published each year in scientific journals are the most successful? Which ones have done the most to advance scientists’ understanding, alter the course of climate change research, or inspire future generations?

On Wednesday, Carbon Brief will reveal the results of our analysis into which scientific papers on the topic of climate change are the most “cited”. That means, how many times other scientists have mentioned them in their own published research. It’s a pretty good measure of how much impact a paper has had in the science world.

But there are other ways to measure influence. Before we reveal the figures on the most-cited research, Carbon Brief has asked climate experts what they think are the most influential papers.

We asked all the coordinating lead authors, lead authors and review editors on the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to nominate three papers from any time in history. This is the exact question we posed:

What do you consider to be the three most influential papers in the field of climate change?

As you might expect from a broad mix of physical scientists, economists, social scientists and policy experts, the nominations spanned a range of topics and historical periods, capturing some of the great climate pioneers and the very latest climate economics research.

Here’s a link to our summary of who said what . But one paper clearly takes the top spot.

Winner: Manabe & Wetherald ( 1967 )

With eight nominations, a seminal paper by Syukuro Manabe and Richard. T. Wetherald published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences in 1967 tops the Carbon Brief poll as the IPCC scientists’ top choice for the most influential climate change paper of all time.

Entitled, “Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity”, the work was the first to represent the fundamental elements of the Earth’s climate in a computer model, and to explore what doubling carbon dioxide (CO2) would do to global temperature.

Manabe & Wetherald (1967), Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

The Manabe & Wetherald paper is considered by many as a pioneering effort in the field of climate modelling, one that effectively opened the door to projecting future climate change. And the value of climate sensitivity is something climate scientists are still grappling with today .

Prof Piers Forster , a physical climate scientist at Leeds University and lead author of the chapter on clouds and aerosols in working group one of the last IPCC report, tells Carbon Brief:

This was really the first physically sound climate model allowing accurate predictions of climate change.

The paper’s findings have stood the test of time amazingly well, Forster says.

Its results are still valid today. Often when I’ve think I’ve done a new bit of work, I found that it had already been included in this paper.

Prof Steve Sherwood , expert in atmospheric climate dynamics at the University of New South Wales and another lead author on the clouds and aerosols chapter, says it’s a tough choice, but Manabe & Wetherald (1967) gets his vote, too. Sherwood tells Carbon Brief:

[The paper was] the first proper computation of global warming and stratospheric cooling from enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations, including atmospheric emission and water-vapour feedback.

Prof Danny Harvey , professor of climate modelling at the University of Toronto and lead author on the buildings chapter in the IPCC’s working group three report on mitigation, emphasises the Manabe & Wetherald paper’s impact on future generations of scientists. He says:

[The paper was] the first to assess the magnitude of the water vapour feedback, and was frequently cited for a good 20 years after it was published.

Tomorrow, Carbon Brief will be publishing an interview with Syukuro Manabe, alongside a special summary by Prof John Mitchell , the Met Office Hadley Centre’s chief scientist from 2002 to 2008 and director of climate science from 2008 to 2010, on why the paper still holds such significance today.

Joint second: Keeling, C.D et al. ( 1976 )

Jumping forward a decade, a classic paper by Charles Keeling and colleagues in 1976 came in joint second place in the Carbon Brief survey.

Published in the journal Tellus under the title, “Atmospheric carbon dioxide variations at Mauna Loa observatory,” the paper documented for the first time the stark rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii.

A photocopy of Keeling et al., (1976) Source: University of California, Santa Cruz

Dr Jorge Carrasco , Antarctic climate change researcher at the University of Magallanes  in Chile and lead author on the cryosphere chapter in the last IPCC report, tells Carbon Brief why the research underpinning the “Keeling Curve’ was so important.

This paper revealed for the first time the observing increased of the atmospheric CO2 as the result of the combustion of carbon, petroleum and natural gas.

Prof David Stern , energy and environmental economist at the Australian National University and lead author on the Drivers, Trends and Mitigation chapter of the IPCC’s working group three report, also chooses the 1976 Keeling paper, though he notes:

This is a really tough question as there are so many dimensions to the climate problem – natural science, social science, policy etc.

With the Mauna Loa measurements continuing today , the so-called “Keeling curve” is the longest continuous record of carbon dioxide concentration in the world. Its historical significance and striking simplicity has made it one of the most iconic visualisations of climate change.

Source: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Also in joint second place: Held, I.M. & Soden, B.J. ( 2006 )

Fast forwarding a few decades, in joint second place comes a paper by Isaac Held and Brian Soden published in the journal Science in 2006.

The paper, “Robust Responses of the Hydrological Cycle to Global Warming”, identified how rainfall from one place to another would be affected by climate change. Prof Sherwood, who nominated this paper as well as the winning one from Manabe and Wetherald, tells Carbon Brief why it represented an important step forward. He says:

[This paper] advanced what is known as the “wet-get-wetter, dry-get-drier” paradigm for precipitation in global warming. This mantra has been widely misunderstood and misapplied, but was the first and perhaps still the only systematic conclusion about regional precipitation and global warming based on robust physical understanding of the atmosphere.

Held & Soden (2006), Journal of Climate

Honourable mentions

Rather than choosing a single paper, quite a few academics in our survey nominated one or more of the Working Group contributions to the last IPCC report. A couple even suggested the Fifth Assessment Report in its entirety, running to several thousands of pages. The original IPCC report , published in 1990, also got mentioned.

It was clear from the results that scientists tended to pick papers related to their own field. For example, Prof Ottmar Edenhofer , chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group Three report on mitigation, selected four papers from the last 20 years on the economics of climate change costs versus risks, recent emissions trends, the technological feasibility of strong emissions reductions and the nature of international climate cooperation.

Taking a historical perspective, a few more of the early pioneers of climate science featured in our results, too. For example, Svante Arrhenius’ famous 1896 paper  on the Greenhouse Effect, entitled “On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground”, received a couple of votes.

Prof Jonathan Wiener , environmental policy expert at Duke University in the US and lead author on the International Cooperation chapter in the IPCC’s working group three report, explains why this paper should be remembered as one of the most influential in climate policy. He says:

[This is the] classic paper showing that rising greenhouse gas concentrations lead to increasing global average surface temperature.

Svante Arrhenius (1896), Philosophical Magazine

A few decades later, a paper by Guy Callendar in 1938  linked the increase in carbon dioxide concentration over the previous 50 years to rising temperatures. Entitled, “The artificial production of carbon dioxide and its influence on temperature,” the paper marked an important step forward in climate change research, says Andrew Solow , director of the Woods Hole Marine Policy centre and lead author on the detection and attribution of climate impacts chapter in the IPCC’s working group two report. He says:

There is earlier work on the greenhouse effect, but not (to my knowledge) on the connection between increasing levels of CO2 and temperature.

Though it may feature in the climate change literature hall of fame, this paper raises a question about how to define a paper’s influence, says Forster. Rather than being celebrated among his contemporaries, Callendar’s work achieved recognition a long time after it was published. Forster says:

I would loved to have chosen Callendar (1938) as the first attribution paper that changed the world. Unfortunately, the 1938 effort of Callendar was only really recognised afterwards as being a founding publication of the field … The same comment applies to earlier Arrhenius and Tyndall efforts. They were only influential in hindsight.

Guy Callendar and his 1938 paper in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society

Other honourable mentions in the Carbon Brief survey of most influential climate papers go to Norman Phillips, whose 1956 paper described the first general circulation model, William Nordhaus’s 1991 paper on the economics of the greenhouse effect, and a paper by Camile Parmesan and Gary Yohe in 2003 , considered by many to provide the first formal attribution of climate change impacts on animal and plant species.

Finally, James Hansen’s 2012 paper , “Public perception of climate change and the new climate dice”, was important in highlighting the real-world impacts of climate change, says Prof Andy Challinor , expert in climate change impacts at the University of Leeds and lead author on the food security chapter in the working group two report. He says:

[It] helped with demonstrating the strong links between extreme events this century and climate change. Result: more clarity and less hedging.

Marc Levi , a political scientist at Columbia University and lead author on the IPCC’s human security chapter, makes a wider point, telling Carbon Brief:

The importance is in showing that climate change is observable in the present.

Indeed, attribution of extreme weather continues to be at the forefront of climate science, pushing scientists’ understanding of the climate system and modern technology to their limits.

Look out for more on the latest in attribution research as Carbon Brief reports on the Our Common Futures Under Climate Change conference taking place in Paris this week.

Pinning down which climate science papers most changed the world is difficult, and we suspect climate scientists could argue about this all day. But while the question elicits a range of very personal preferences, stories and characters, one paper has clearly stood the test of time and emerged as the popular choice among today’s climate experts – Manabe and Wetherald, 1967.

Main image: Satellite image of Hurricane Katrina.

• What are the most influential climate change papers of all time?

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Climate Change: Evidence and Causes: Update 2020 (2020)

Chapter: conclusion, c onclusion.

This document explains that there are well-understood physical mechanisms by which changes in the amounts of greenhouse gases cause climate changes. It discusses the evidence that the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere have increased and are still increasing rapidly, that climate change is occurring, and that most of the recent change is almost certainly due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities. Further climate change is inevitable; if emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, future changes will substantially exceed those that have occurred so far. There remains a range of estimates of the magnitude and regional expression of future change, but increases in the extremes of climate that can adversely affect natural ecosystems and human activities and infrastructure are expected.

Citizens and governments can choose among several options (or a mixture of those options) in response to this information: they can change their pattern of energy production and usage in order to limit emissions of greenhouse gases and hence the magnitude of climate changes; they can wait for changes to occur and accept the losses, damage, and suffering that arise; they can adapt to actual and expected changes as much as possible; or they can seek as yet unproven “geoengineering” solutions to counteract some of the climate changes that would otherwise occur. Each of these options has risks, attractions and costs, and what is actually done may be a mixture of these different options. Different nations and communities will vary in their vulnerability and their capacity to adapt. There is an important debate to be had about choices among these options, to decide what is best for each group or nation, and most importantly for the global population as a whole. The options have to be discussed at a global scale because in many cases those communities that are most vulnerable control few of the emissions, either past or future. Our description of the science of climate change, with both its facts and its uncertainties, is offered as a basis to inform that policy debate.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following individuals served as the primary writing team for the 2014 and 2020 editions of this document:

• Eric Wolff FRS, (UK lead), University of Cambridge
• Inez Fung (NAS, US lead), University of California, Berkeley
• Brian Hoskins FRS, Grantham Institute for Climate Change
• John F.B. Mitchell FRS, UK Met Office
• Tim Palmer FRS, University of Oxford
• Benjamin Santer (NAS), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• John Shepherd FRS, University of Southampton
• Keith Shine FRS, University of Reading.
• Susan Solomon (NAS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• John Walsh, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
• Don Wuebbles, University of Illinois

Staff support for the 2020 revision was provided by Richard Walker, Amanda Purcell, Nancy Huddleston, and Michael Hudson. We offer special thanks to Rebecca Lindsey and NOAA Climate.gov for providing data and figure updates.

The following individuals served as reviewers of the 2014 document in accordance with procedures approved by the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences:

• Richard Alley (NAS), Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University
• Alec Broers FRS, Former President of the Royal Academy of Engineering
• Harry Elderfield FRS, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
• Joanna Haigh FRS, Professor of Atmospheric Physics, Imperial College London
• Isaac Held (NAS), NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
• John Kutzbach (NAS), Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin
• Jerry Meehl, Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research
• John Pendry FRS, Imperial College London
• John Pyle FRS, Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge
• Gavin Schmidt, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey
• Gabrielle Walker, Journalist
• Andrew Watson FRS, University of East Anglia

The Support for the 2014 Edition was provided by NAS Endowment Funds. We offer sincere thanks to the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Endowment for NAS Missions for supporting the production of this 2020 Edition.

F OR FURTHER READING

For more detailed discussion of the topics addressed in this document (including references to the underlying original research), see:

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019: Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate [ https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc ]
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), 2019: Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25259 ]
• Royal Society, 2018: Greenhouse gas removal [ https://raeng.org.uk/greenhousegasremoval ]
• U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), 2018: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States [ https://nca2018.globalchange.gov ]
• IPCC, 2018: Global Warming of 1.5°C [ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15 ]
• USGCRP, 2017: Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume I: Climate Science Special Reports [ https://science2017.globalchange.gov ]
• NASEM, 2016: Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/21852 ]
• IPCC, 2013: Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Working Group 1. Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis [ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1 ]
• NRC, 2013: Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18373 ]
• NRC, 2011: Climate Stabilization Targets: Emissions, Concentrations, and Impacts Over Decades to Millennia [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12877 ]
• Royal Society 2010: Climate Change: A Summary of the Science [ https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/publications/2010/climate-change-summary-science ]
• NRC, 2010: America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change [ https://www.nap.edu/catalog/12782 ]

Much of the original data underlying the scientific findings discussed here are available at:

• https://data.ucar.edu/
• https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu
• https://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu
• https://ess-dive.lbl.gov/
• https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
• https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
• http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu
• http://hahana.soest.hawaii.edu/hot/

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth's climate. The Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences, with their similar missions to promote the use of science to benefit society and to inform critical policy debates, produced the original Climate Change: Evidence and Causes in 2014. It was written and reviewed by a UK-US team of leading climate scientists. This new edition, prepared by the same author team, has been updated with the most recent climate data and scientific analyses, all of which reinforce our understanding of human-caused climate change.

Scientific information is a vital component for society to make informed decisions about how to reduce the magnitude of climate change and how to adapt to its impacts. This booklet serves as a key reference document for decision makers, policy makers, educators, and others seeking authoritative answers about the current state of climate-change science.

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Protecting people from a changing climate: The case for resilience

About the authors.

This article is a collaborative effort by Harry Bowcott , Lori Fomenko, Alastair Hamilton , Mekala Krishnan , Mihir Mysore , Alexis Trittipo, and Oliver Walker.

The United Nations’ 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report stated —with higher confidence than ever before—that, without meaningful decarbonization, global temperatures will rise to at least 1.5°C above preindustrial levels within the next two decades. 1 Climate change 2021: The physical science basis , Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), August 2021, ipcc.ch. This could have potentially dangerous and irreversible effects. A better understanding of how a changing climate could affect people around the world is a necessary first step toward defining solutions for protecting communities and building resilience. 2 For further details on how a changing climate will impact a range of socioeconomic systems, see “ Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts ,” McKinsey Global Institute, January 16, 2020.

As part of our knowledge partnership with Race to Resilience at the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, we have built a detailed, global assessment of the number of people exposed to four key physical climate hazards, primarily under two different warming scenarios. This paper lays out our methodology and our conclusions from this independent assessment.

A climate risk analysis focused on people: Our methodology in brief

Our research consists of a global analysis of the exposure of people’s lives and livelihoods to multiple hazards related to a changing climate. This analysis identifies people who are potentially vulnerable to four core climate hazards—heat stress, urban water stress, agricultural drought, and riverine and coastal flooding—even if warming is kept within 2.0°C above preindustrial levels.

Our methodology

The study integrates climate and socioeconomic data sources at a granular level to evaluate exposure to climate hazards. We used an ensemble mean of a selection of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) global climate models under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 —using a Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP2) for urban water stress—with analysis conducted under two potential warming scenarios: global mean temperature increases above preindustrial levels of 1.5°C and 2.0°C. We sometimes use the shorthand of “1.5°C warming scenario” and “2.0°C warming scenario” to describe these scenarios. Our modeling of temperatures in 2030 refers to a multidecadal average between 2021 and 2040. When we say 2050, we refer to a multidecadal average between 2041 and 2060. These are considered relative to a reference period, which is dependent on hazard basis data availability (which we sometimes refer to as “today”).

We built our analysis by applying 2030 and 2050 population-growth projections to our 1.5°C and 2.0°C warming scenarios, respectively. This amount of warming by those time periods is consistent with an RCP 8.5 scenario, relative to the preindustrial average. Climate science makes extensive use of scenarios. We chose a higher emissions scenario of RCP 8.5 to measure the full inherent risk from a changing climate. Research also suggests that cumulative historical emissions, which indicate the actual degree of warming, have been in line with RCP 8.5. 1 For further details, see “ Climate risk and response ,” January 16, 2020, appendix; see also Philip B. Duffy, Spencer Glendon, and Christopher R. Schwalm, “RCP8.5 tracks cumulative CO2 emissions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) , August 2020, Volume 117, Number 33, pp. 19656–7, pnas.org. In some instances, we have also considered a scenario in which decarbonization actions limit warming and 1.5°C of warming relative to the preindustrial levels is only achieved in 2050, rather than in 2030. For our analysis we used models which differ to some extent on their exact amount of warming and timing, even across the same emissions scenario (RCP 8.5). Naturally, all forward-looking climate models are subject to uncertainty, and taking such an ensemble approach to our model allows us to account for some of that model uncertainty and error. 2 For a more detailed discussion of these uncertainties, see chapter 1 of “ Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts ,” McKinsey Global Institute, January 16, 2020. However, the mean amount of warming typically seen across our ensemble of models is approximately 1.5°C by 2030 and 2.0°C by 2050.

Our analysis consisted of three major steps (see technical appendix for details on our methodology):

First, we divided the surface of the planet into a grid composed of five-kilometer cells, with climate hazards and socioeconomic data mapped for each cell.

Second, in each of those cells, we combined climate and socioeconomic data to estimate the number and vulnerability of people likely to be exposed to climate hazards. These data were categorized on the basis of severity and classified on the basis of exposure to one or more hazards at the grid-cell level.

Third, taking into account people’s vulnerability, we examined the potential impact of our four core hazards on the current and future global population. To do this, we assessed, globally, the number and vulnerability of people affected by different types and severities of hazards. We then aggregated the data from each cell up to the subnational, national, subcontinental, continental, and global levels to allow for comparison across countries.

It’s important to note that we carefully selected these four hazards because they capture the bulk of hazards likely to affect populations on a global scale. We did not account for a range of other hazards such as wildfires, extreme cold, and snow events. Further, our analysis accounts only for first-order effects of climate hazards and does not take into account secondary or indirect effects, which can have meaningful impact. Drought, for example, can lead to higher food prices and even migration—none of which are included in our analysis. Thus, the number of people affected by climate hazards is potentially underestimated in this work.

A focus on four main climate hazards

For our study, we used global data sets covering four key hazards: heat stress, urban water stress, agricultural drought, and riverine and coastal flooding. We relied on data from a selection of CMIP5 climate models, unless otherwise specified. For further details, see the technical appendix.

Heat stress

Heat stress can have meaningful impacts on lives and livelihoods as the climate changes. Heat stress is measured using wet-bulb temperature, which combines heat and humidity. We assess heat stress in the form of acute exposure to humid heat-wave occurrence as well as potential chronic loss in effective working hours, both of which depend on daily wet-bulb temperatures. Above a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C, heat stress can be fatal.

Acute humid heat waves are defined by the average wet-bulb temperature of the hottest six-hour period during a rolling three-day period in which the daily maximum wet-bulb temperature exceeds 34°C for three consecutive days. 3 Analysis of lethal heat waves in our previous McKinsey Global Institute report (see “ Climate risk and response ,” January 16, 2020) was limited to urban populations, and the temperature threshold was set to 34°C wet-bulb temperature under the assumption that the true wet-bulb temperature would actually be 35°C due to an additional 1°C from the urban heat-island effect. Heat-wave occurrence was calculated for each year for both a reference time period 4 The reference period for heat stress refers to the average between 1998 and 2017. and our two future time periods and translated into annual probabilities. Exposure was defined as anyone living in either an urban or rural location with at least a 2 percent annual probability of experiencing such a humid heat wave in any given year. Acute humid heat waves of 34°C or higher can be detrimental to health, even for a healthy and well-hydrated human resting in the shade, because the body begins to struggle with core body-temperature regulation and the likelihood of experiencing a heat stroke increases.

Chronic heat stress was assessed for select livelihoods and defined by processing daily mean air temperature and relative humidity data into a heat index and translating that into the fraction of average annual effective working hours lost due to heat exposure. This calculation was conducted following the methods of John P. Dunne et al., 5 John P. Dunne, Ronald J. Stouffer, and Jasmin G. John, “Reductions in labour capacity from heat stress under climate warming,” Nature Climate Change , 2013, Volume 3, Number 6, pp. 563–6, nature.com. using empirically corrected International Organization for Standardization (ISO) heat-exposure standards from Josh Foster et al. 6 Josh Foster et al., “A new paradigm to quantify the reduction of physical work capacity in the heat,” Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise , 2019, Volume 51, Number 6S, p. 15, journals.lww.com.

We combined groups of people who were exposed to both chronic and acute heat stress to assess the aggregate number of people exposed. Heat stress can affect livelihoods, particularly for those employed in outdoor occupations, most prominently because an increased need for rest and a reduction in the body’s efficiency reduce effective working hours. Therefore, our analysis of potential exposure to chronic heat stress was limited to people estimated to be working in agriculture, crafts and trades, elementary, factory-based, and manufacturing occupations likely to experience at least a 5 percent loss of effective working hours on average annually. We excluded managers, professional staff, and others who are more likely to work indoors, in offices, or in other cooled environments from this analysis.

Urban water stress

Urban water stress 7 The reference period for water stress refers to the average between 1950 and 2010. often occurs in areas in which demand for water from residents, local industries, municipalities, and others exceeds the available supply. This issue can become progressively worse over time as demand for water continues to increase and supply either remains constant, decreases due to a changing climate, or even increases but not quickly enough to match demand. This can reduce urban residents’ access to drinking water or slow production in urban industry and agriculture.

Our analysis of water stress is limited to urban areas partially because water stress is primarily a demand-driven issue that is more influenced by socioeconomic factors than by changes in climate. We also wanted to avoid methodological overlap with our agricultural drought analysis, which mostly focused on rural areas.

We define urban water stress as the ratio of water demand to supply for urban areas globally. We used World Resources Institute (WRI) data for baseline water stress today and the SSP2 scenario for future water stress outlooks, where 2030 represents the 1.5°C warming scenario and 2040 represents the 2.0°C warming scenario. We only considered severe water stress, defined as withdrawals of 80 percent or more of the total supply, which WRI classifies as “extremely high” water stress.

We make a distinction for “most severe” urban water stress, defined as withdrawals of more than 100 percent of the total supply, to show how many people could be affected by water running out—a situation that will require meaningful interventions to avoid. However, for the sake of the overall exposure analysis, people exposed to the most severe category are considered to be exposed to “severe” water stress unless otherwise noted (exhibit).

Agricultural drought

Agricultural drought 8 The reference period for agricultural drought refers to the average between 1986 and 2005. is a slow-onset hazard defined by a period of months or years that is dry relative to a region’s normal precipitation and soil-moisture conditions, specifically, anomalously dry soils in areas where crops are grown. Drought can inhibit plant growth and reduce plant production, potentially leading to poor yields and crop failures. For more details, see the technical appendix.

Riverine and coastal flooding

We define flooding as the presence of water at least one centimeter deep on normally dry land. We analyze two types of flooding here: riverine flooding from rivers bursting their banks and coastal flooding from storm surges and rising sea levels pushing water onto coastal land. Both coastal and riverine flooding can damage property and infrastructure. In severe cases, they could lead to loss of life. 9 The reference period for riverine flooding refers to the average between 1960 and 1999; the reference period for coastal flooding refers to the average between 1979 and 2014. For more details, see the technical appendix.

Based on a combination of frequency and intensity metrics, we estimated three severity levels of each climate hazard: mild, moderate, and severe (exhibit).

Even when we only look at first-order effects, it is clear that building resilience and protecting people from climate hazards are critical. Our analysis provides data that may be used to identify the areas of highest potential exposure and vulnerability and to help build a case for investing in climate resilience on a global scale.

Our findings suggest the following conclusions:

• Under a scenario with 1.5°C of warming above preindustrial levels by 2030, almost half of the world’s population could be exposed to a climate hazard related to heat stress, drought, flood, or water stress in the next decade, up from 43 percent today 3 Climate science makes extensive use of scenarios; we have chosen Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 and a multimodel ensemble to best model the full inherent risk absent mitigation and adaption. Scenario 1 consists of a mean global temperature rise of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, which is reached by about 2030 under this RCP; Scenario 2 consists of a mean global temperature rise of 2.0°C above preindustrial levels, reached around 2050 under this RCP. Following standard practice, future estimates for 2030 and 2050 represent average climatic behavior over multidecadal periods: 2030 represents the average of the 2021–2040 period, and 2050 represents the average of the 2041–2060 period. We also compare results with today, also based on multidecadal averages, which differ by hazard. For further details, see technical appendix. —and almost a quarter of the world’s population would be exposed to severe hazards. (For detailed explanations of these hazards and how we define “severe,” see sidebar “A climate risk analysis focused on people: Our methodology in brief.”)
• Indeed, as severe climate events become more common, even in a scenario where the world reaches 1.5°C of warming above preindustrial levels by 2050 rather than 2030, nearly one in four people could be exposed to a severe climate hazard that could affect their lives or livelihoods.
• Climate hazards are unevenly distributed. On average, lower-income countries are more likely to be exposed to certain climate hazards compared with many upper-income countries, primarily due to their geographical location but also to the nature of their economies. (That said, both warming scenarios outlined here are likely to expose a larger share of people in nearly all nations to one of the four modeled climate hazards compared with today.) Those who fall within the most vulnerable categories are also more likely to be exposed to a physical climate hazard.

These human-centric data can help leaders identify the best areas of focus and the scale of response needed to help people—particularly the most vulnerable—build their climate resilience.

A larger proportion of the global population could be exposed to a severe climate hazard compared with today

Under a scenario with 1.5°C of warming above preindustrial levels by 2030, almost half of the world’s population—approximately 5.0 billion people—could be exposed to a climate hazard related to heat stress, drought, flood, or water stress in the next decade, up from 43 percent (3.3 billion people) today.

In much of the discussion below, we focus on severe climate hazards to highlight the most significant effects from a changing climate. We find that regardless of whether warming is limited to 1.5°C or reaches 2.0°C above preindustrial levels by 2050, severe hazard occurrence is likely to increase, and a much larger proportion of the global population could be exposed compared with today (Exhibit 1).

This proportion could more than double, with approximately one in three people likely to be exposed to a severe hazard under a 2.0°C warming scenario by 2050, compared with an estimated one in six exposed today. This amounts to about 2.0 billion additional people likely to be exposed by 2050. Even in a scenario where aggressive decarbonization results in just 1.5°C of warming above preindustrial levels by 2050, the number of people exposed to severe climate hazards could still increase to nearly one in four of the total projected global population, compared with one in six today.

One-sixth of the total projected global population, or about 1.4 billion people, could be exposed to severe heat stress, either acute (humid heat waves) or chronic (lost effective working hours), under a 2.0°C warming scenario above preindustrial levels by 2050, compared with less than 1 percent, or about 0.1 billion people, likely to be exposed today (Exhibit 2).

Our results suggest that both the severity and the geographic reach of severe heat stress may increase to affect more people globally, despite modeled projections of population growth, population shifts from rural to urban areas, and economic migration. Our analysis does not attempt to account for climate-change-related migration or resilience interventions, which could decrease exposure by either forcing people to move away from hot spots or mitigating impacts from severe heat stress.

For those with livelihoods affected by severe chronic heat stress, it could become too hot to work outside during at least 25 percent of effective working hours in any given year. This would likely affect incomes and might even require certain industries to rethink their operations and the nature of workers’ roles. For outdoor workers, extreme heat exposure could also result in chronic exhaustion and other long-term health issues. Heat stress can cause reductions in worker productivity and hours worked due to physiological limits on the human body, as well as an increased need for rest.

We have already seen some of the impacts of acute heat stress in recent years. In the summer of 2010 in Russia, tens of thousands of people died of respiratory illness or heat stress during a large heat-wave event in which temperatures rose to more than 10°C (50°F) higher than average temperatures for those dates. One academic study claims “an approximate 80 percent probability” that the new record high temperature “would not have occurred without climate warming.” 4 Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf, “Increase of extreme events in a warming world,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) , November 2011, Volume 108, Number 44, pp. 17905–9, pnas.org. To date these impacts have been isolated events, but the potential impact of heat stress on a much broader scale is possible in a 1.5°C or 2.0°C warming scenario in the coming decades.

While we did not assess second-order impacts, they could also be meaningful. Secondary impacts from heat stress may include loss of power, and therefore air conditioning, due to greater stress on electrical grids during acute heat waves, 5 Sofia Aivalioti, Electricity sector adaptation to heat waves , Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Columbia University, 2015, academiccommons.columbia.edu. increased stress on hospitals due to increased emergency room visits and admission rates primarily during acute heat-stress events, 6 Climate change and extreme heat events , Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2015, cdc.gov. and migration driven primarily by impacts from chronic heat stress. 7 Mariam Traore Chazalnoël, Dina Ionesco, and Eva Mach, Extreme heat and migration , International Organization for Migration, United Nations, 2017, environmentalmigration.iom.int.

The rate of growth in global urban water demand is highly likely to outpace that of urban water supply under future warming and socioeconomic pathway scenarios, compared with the overall historical baseline period (1950–2010). In most geographies, this problem is primarily caused not by climate change but by population growth and a corresponding growth in demand for water. However, in some geographies, urban water stress can be exacerbated by the impact of climate change on water supply. In a 2.0°C warming scenario above preindustrial levels by 2050, about 800 million additional people could be living in urban areas under severe water stress compared with today (Exhibit 3). This could result in lack of access to water supplies for drinking, washing and cleaning, and maintaining industrial operations. In some areas, this could make a case for investment in infrastructure such as pipes and desalination plants to make up for the deficit.

Agricultural drought is most likely to directly affect people employed in the agricultural sector: in conditions of anomalously dry soils, plants do not have an adequate water supply, which inhibits plant growth and reduces production. This in turn could have adverse impacts on agricultural livelihoods.

In a scenario with warming 2.0°C above preindustrial levels by 2050, nearly 100 million people—or approximately one in seven of the total global rural population projected to be employed in the agricultural sector by 2050—could be exposed to a severe level of drought, defined as an average of seven to eight drought years per decade. This could severely diminish people’s ability to maintain a livelihood in rainfed agriculture. Additional irrigation would be required, placing further strain on water demand, and yields could still be reduced if exposed to other heat-related hazards.

While our analysis focused on the first-order effects of agricultural drought, the real-world impact could be much larger. Meaningful second-order effects of agricultural drought include reduced access to drinking water and widespread malnutrition. In addition, drought in regions with insufficient aid can cause infectious disease to spread.

Further, although our analysis did not cover food security, many other studies have posited that if people are unable to appropriately adapt, this level of warming would raise the risk of breadbasket failures and could lead to higher food prices. 8 For more on how a changing climate might affect global breadbaskets, see “ Will the world’s breadbaskets become less reliable? ,” McKinsey Global Institute, May 18, 2020.

Primarily as a result of surging demand exacerbated by climate change, 9 Salvatore Pascale et al., “Increasing risk of another Cape Town ‘Day Zero’ drought in the 21st century, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) , November 2020, Volume 117, Number 47, pp. 29495–503, pnas.org. Cape Town, South Africa, a semi-arid country, recently experienced a water shortage. From 2015 to 2018, unusually high temperatures contributed to higher rates of evaporation with less refresh due to low rainfall, contributing to decline in water reserves which fell to the point of emergency 10 “Cape Town’s Water is Running Out,” NASA Earth Observatory, January 14, 2018, earthobservatory.nasa.gov. —by January 2018, about 4.3 million residents of South Africa had endured years of constant restrictions on water use in both urban and agricultural settings. Area farmers recorded losses, and many agricultural workers lost their jobs. In the city, businesses were hit with steep water tariffs, jobs were lost, and residents had to ration water.

Under a scenario with warming 2.0°C above preindustrial levels by 2050, about 400 million people could be exposed to severe riverine or coastal flooding, which may breach existing defenses in place today. As the planet warms, patterns of flooding are likely to shift. This could lead to decreased flood depth in some regions and increases likely beyond the capacity of existing defenses in others.

Riverine floods can disrupt travel and supply chains, damage homes and infrastructure, and even lead to loss of life in extreme cases. The most vulnerable are likely to be disproportionately affected—fragile homes in informal coastal settlements are highly vulnerable to flood-related damages.

This analysis does not account for the secondary impacts of floods that may affect people. In rural areas, floods could cause the salinity of soil to increase, which in turn could damage agricultural productivity. Flooding could also make rural roads impassable, limiting residents’ ability to evacuate and their access to emergency response. Major floods sometimes lead to widespread impacts caused by population displacement, healthcare disruptions, food supply disruptions, drinking-water contamination, psychological trauma, and the spread of respiratory and insect-borne disease. 11 Christopher Ohl and Sue Tapsell, “Flooding and human health: The dangers posed are not always obvious,” British Medical Journal (BMJ) , 2000, Volume 321, Number 7270, pp. 1167–8, bmj.com; Shuili Du, C.B. Bhattacharya, and Sankar Sen, “Maximizing business returns to corporate social responsibility (CSR): The role of CSR communication,” International Journal of Management Reviews (IJMR) , 2010, Volume 12, Number 1, pp. 8–19, onlinelibrary.wiley.com. The severity of these impacts varies meaningfully across geographic and socioeconomic factors. 12 Roger Few et al., Floods, health and climate change: A strategic review , Tyndall Centre working paper, number 63, November 2004, unisdr.org.

People in lower-income countries tend to have higher levels of exposure to hazards

Our analysis suggests that exposure to climate hazards is unevenly distributed. Overall, a greater proportion of people living in lower-income countries are likely to be exposed to one or more climate hazards (Exhibit 4). Under a scenario with warming 2.0°C above preindustrial levels by 2050, more than half the total projected global population could be affected by a climate hazard. On the other hand, only 10 percent of the total population in high-income countries is likely to be exposed. That said, there could also be meaningful increases in overall exposure in developed nations. For example, based on 2050 population projections, about 160 million people in the United States—almost forty percent of the US population—could be exposed to at least one of the four climate hazards in a 2.0°C warming scenario by 2050.

In all, our analysis suggests that nearly twice as many highly vulnerable people (those estimated to have lower income and who may also have inadequate shelter, transportation, skills, or funds to protect themselves from climate risks) could be exposed to a climate hazard (Exhibit 5).

One of the implications of these findings is that certain countries are likely to be disproportionately affected. Two-thirds of the people who could be exposed to a climate hazard in a 2.0°C warming scenario by 2050 are concentrated in just ten countries. In two of these, Bangladesh and Pakistan, more than 90 percent of the population could be exposed to at least one climate hazard.

India’s vulnerability to climate hazards

Today, India accounts for more than 17 percent of the world’s population. In a scenario with 2.0°C warming above preindustrial levels by 2050, nearly 70 percent of India’s projected population, or 1.2 billion people, is likely to be exposed to one of the four climate hazards analyzed in this report, compared with the current exposure of nearly half of India’s population (0.7 billion). India could account for about 25 percent of the total global population likely to be exposed to a climate hazard under a 2.0°C warming scenario by 2050, relative to today.

Just as the absolute number of people likely to be exposed to hazards is increasing, so too is the proportion of people likely to be exposed to a severe climate hazard. Today, approximately one in six people in India are likely to be exposed to a severe climate hazard that puts lives and livelihoods at risk. Using 2050 population estimates and a scenario with 2.0°C warming above preindustrial levels by 2050, we estimate that this proportion could increase to nearly one in two people.

Severe heat stress is the primary culprit of severe climate hazard exposure, potentially affecting approximately 650 million residents of India by 2050 in the 2.0°C warming scenario, compared with just under ten million today (exhibit).

A vast number of people in India could also be exposed. Under a scenario with warming 2.0°C above preindustrial levels by 2050, nearly half of India’s projected population—approximately 850 million—could be exposed to a severe climate hazard. This equates to nearly one-quarter of the estimated 3.1 billion people likely to be exposed to a severe climate hazard globally by 2050 under a 2.0°C warming scenario (see sidebar “India’s vulnerability to climate hazards”).

Between now and 2050, population models 13 “Spatial Population Scenarios,” City University of New York and NCAR, updated August 2018, cgd.ucar.edu. project that the world could gain an additional 1.6 billion people, a proportion of whom are likely to be more exposed, more vulnerable, and less resilient to climate impacts.

For example, much of this population growth is likely to come from urban areas. Urbanization is likely to exacerbate the urban heat-island effect—in which human activities cause cities to be warmer than outlying areas—and humid heat waves could take an even greater toll. Urbanization is likely a driver in increased exposure of populations in coastal and riverine cities.

In India and other less developed economies, water stress is less of a climate problem and more of a socioeconomic problem. Our work and previous work on the topic has shown that increased water stress is mostly due to increases in demand—which is primarily driven by population growth in urban areas.

As labor shifts away from agriculture and other outdoor occupations toward indoor work, fewer people may be exposed to the effects of agricultural drought and heat stress. But on balance, many more people will likely be exposed to climate hazards by 2050 than today under either a 1.5°C or a 2.0°C warming scenario above preindustrial levels.

Many regions of the world are already experiencing elevated warming on a regional scale. It is estimated that 20 to 40 percent of today’s global population (depending on the temperature data set used) has experienced mean temperatures of at least 1.5°C higher than the preindustrial average in at least one season. 14 “Chapter 1: Framing and context,” Special report: Global warming of 1.5°C , International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2018, ipcc.ch.

Mitigation will be critical to minimizing risk. However, much of the warming likely to occur in the next decade has already been “locked in” based on past emissions and physical inertia in the climate system. 15 H. Damon Matthews et al., “Focus on cumulative emissions, global carbon budgets, and the implications for climate mitigation targets,” Environmental Research Letters, January 2018, Volume 13, Number 1. Therefore, in addition to accelerating a path to lower emissions, leaders need to build resilience against climate events into their plans.

Around the world, there are examples of innovative ways to build resilience against climate hazards. For example, the regional government of Quintana Roo on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula insured its coral reefs in an arrangement with an insurance firm, providing incentives for the insurer to manage any degradation, 16 “World’s first coral reef insurance policy triggered by Hurricane Delta,” Nature Conservancy, December 7, 2020, nature.org. and a redesigned levee system put in place after Hurricane Katrina may have mitigated the worst effects of Hurricane Ida for the citizens of New Orleans. 17 Sarah McQuate, “UW engineer explains how the redesigned levee system in New Orleans helped mitigate the impact of Hurricane Ida,” University of Washington, September 2, 2021, washington.edu.

Nonstate actors may have particular opportunities to help build resilience. For instance, insurance companies may be in a position to encourage institutions to build resilience by offering insurance products for those that make the right investments. This can lower reliance on public money as the first source of funding for recovery from climate events. Civil-engineering companies can participate in innovative public–private partnerships to accelerate infrastructure projects. Companies in the agricultural and food sectors can help farmers around the world mitigate the effects that climate hazards can have on food production—for example, offers of financing can encourage farmers to make investments in resilience. The financial-services sector can get involved by offering better financing rates to borrowers who agree to disclose and reduce emissions and make progress on sustainability goals. And, among other actions, all companies can work to make their own operations and supply chains more resilient.

Accelerating this innovation, and scaling solutions that work quickly, could help us build resilience ahead of the most severe climate hazards.

Harry Bowcott is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office, Lori Fomenko is a consultant in the Denver office, Alastair Hamilton is a partner in the London office, Mekala Krishnan is a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and a partner in the Boston office, Mihir Mysore is a partner in the Houston office, Alexis Trittipo is an associate partner in the New York office, and Oliver Walker is a director at Vivid Economics, part of McKinsey’s Sustainability Practice.

The authors wish to thank Shruti Badri, Riley Brady, Zach Bruick, Hauke Engel, Meredith Fish, Fabian Franzini, Kelly Kochanski, Romain Paniagua, Hamid Samandari, Humayun Tai, and Kasia Torkarska for their contributions to this article. They also wish to thank external adviser Guiling Wang and the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

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2024 Environmental Performance Index: A Surprise Top Ranking, Global Biodiversity Commitment Tested

The Baltic nation of Estonia is No. 1 in the 2024 rankings, while Denmark, one of the top ranked countries in the 2022 EPI dropped to 10 th place, highlighting the challenges of reducing emissions in hard-to-decarbonize industries. Meanwhile, “paper parks” are proving a global challenge to international biodiversity commitments.

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In 2022, at the UN Biodiversity Conference, COP 15, in Montreal over 190 countries made what has been called “the biggest conservation commitment the world has ever seen.”  The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework called for the effective protection and management of 30% of the world’s terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine areas by the year 2030 — commonly known as the 30x30 target. While there has been progress toward reaching this ambitious goal of protecting 30% of land and seas on paper, just ahead of World Environment Day, the 2024 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) , an analysis by Yale researchers that provides a data-driven summary of the state of sustainability around the world, shows that in many cases such protections have failed to halt ecosystem loss or curtail environmentally destructive practices.

A new metric that assesses how well countries are protecting important ecosystems indicated that while nations have made progress in protecting land and seas, many of these areas are “paper parks” where commercial activities such as mining and trawling continue to occur — sometimes at a higher rate than in non-protected areas. The EPI analyses show that in 23 countries, more than 10% of the land protected is covered by croplands and buildings, and in 35 countries there is more fishing activity inside marine protected areas than outside. 

“Protected areas are failing to achieve their goals in different ways,” said Sebastián Block Munguía, a postdoctoral associate with the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and the lead author of the report. “In Europe, destructive fishing is allowed inside marine protected areas, and a large fraction of the area protected in land is covered by croplands, not natural ecosystems. In many developing countries, even when destructive activities are not allowed in protected areas, shortages of funding and personnel make it difficult to enforce rules.”

The 2024 EPI, published by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network ranks 180 countries based on 58 performance indicators to track progress on mitigating climate change, promoting environmental health, and safeguarding ecosystem vitality. The data evaluates efforts by the nations to reach U.N. sustainability goals, the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement, as well as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The data for the index underlying different indicators come from a variety of academic institutions and international organizations and cover different periods. Protected area coverage indicators are based on data from March 2024, while greenhouse emissions data are from 2022.

Estonia has decreased its GHG emissions by 59% compared to 1990. The energy sector will be the biggest contributor in reducing emissions in the coming years as we have an aim to produce 100% of our electricity consumption from renewables by 2030.”

The index found that many countries that were leading in sustainability goals have fallen behind or stalled, illustrating the challenges of reducing emissions in hard-to-decarbonize industries and resistant sectors such as agriculture. In several countries, recent drops in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) have been the result of external circumstances, not policy. For example, in Albania, supply chain disruptions led to more expensive animal feed that resulted in a sharp reduction in cows and, consequentially, nitrous oxide and methane emissions.

Estonia leads this year’s rankings with a 40% drop in GHG emissions over the last decade, largely attributed to replacing dirty oil shale power plants with cleaner energy sources. The country is drafting a proposal to achieve by 2040 a CO2 neutral energy sector and a CO2 neutral public transport network in bigger cities.

“Estonia has decreased its GHG emissions by 59% compared to 1990. The energy sector will be the biggest contributor in reducing emissions in the coming years as we have an aim to produce 100% of our electricity consumption from renewables by 2030,” said Kristi Klaas, Estonia’s vice-minister for Green Transition. Klaas discussed some of the policies that led to the country's success as well as ongoing challenges, such as reducing emissions in the agriculture sector, at a webinar hosted by YCELP on June 3.  Dr. Abdullah Ali Abdullah Al-Amri, chairman of the Environment Authority of Oman, also joined the webinar to discuss efforts aimed at protecting the county's multiple ecosystems with rare biodiversity and endangered species, such as the Arabian oryx, and subspecies, such as the Arabian leopard. 

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 Denmark, the top ranked country in the 2022 EPI dropped to 10th place, as its pace of decarbonization slowed, highlighting that those early gains from implementing “low-hanging-fruit policies, such as switching to electricity generation from coal to natural gas and expanding renewable power generation are themselves insufficient,” the index notes. Emissions in the world’s largest economies such as the U.S. (which is ranked 34th) are falling too slowly or still rising — such as in China, Russia, and India, which is ranked 176th.

Over the last decade only five countries — Estonia, Finland, Greece, Timor-Leste, and the United Kingdom — have cut their GHG emissions over the last decade at the rate needed to reach net zero by 2050. Vietnam and other developing countries in Southeast and Southern Asia — such as Pakistan, Laos, Myanmar, and Bangladesh — are ranked the lowest, indicating the urgency of international cooperation to help provide a path for struggling nations to achieve sustainability.

“The 2024 Environmental Performance Index highlights a range of critical sustainability challenges from climate change to biodiversity loss and beyond — and reveals trends suggesting that countries across the world need to redouble their efforts to protect critical ecosystems and the vitality of our planet,” said Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy and director of YCELP.

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When Activist Research Contradicts the Consensus

A new paper attacks the established consensus on the costs of climate change and is welcomed with open arms.

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This month, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) released a preprint of a new paper by Adrien Bilal and Diego R. Känzig that, ostensibly, promises to upend the existing climate economics literature. According to the authors, the economic costs associated with climate change could be six times worse than the previous largest estimates, and 21 times worse than recent values used by the US government.

Their calculation of the social cost of carbon ($1,056 per tonne CO2, or $3,872 per tonne of carbon) places it somewhat…outside the range established by pre-existing estimates:

The working paper, which has not yet been subject to formal peer review, uses complex methods, not entirely documented with data and code, and employs questionable assumptions and extrapolations to arrive at their results, as responses by Richard Tol, Roger Pielke, Matthew Kahn, and others have noted. Yet the media coverage of the paper, including at outlets like the Guardian , Bloomberg , The Globe and Mail , Carbon Brief , Table Climate , has been largely credulous. Prominent climate economist Marshall Burke (whose own work largely stands in contrast to the results of the paper) gave it a big initial boost by advertising it on Twitter . Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia University who has himself published on the social cost of carbon, said, “If the results hold up, and I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t, they will make a massive difference in the overall climate damage estimates.”

As the above figure indicates, there are, in fact, plenty of first-order reasons to doubt the paper’s results. But the extreme outlier nature of their findings isn’t the only red flag. Bilal and Känzig use a somewhat bizarre methodology to find a relationship that defies common sense all in an avowed effort to “reconcile” climate economics with the idea that climate change is an “existential threat.” These methodological gymnastics act as a feature, not a bug, even producing a defense against criticism. Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans, for example, argued that , since other economists can’t even make sense of Bilal and Känzig’s analysis, their critiques are unconvincing.

In a sense, publishing ideologically slanted research is any author’s prerogative, one that hopefully the peer review process will uncover. If anything, the more worrying question raised by this paper is why so many environmental journalists and economists leapt at the chance to endorse a finding that explicitly disavows an existing academic consensus. The whole thing speaks to the threats to substantive research posed by activist commitments, and the incentive structure facing journalists and experts within the broader issue public. When a narrative-driven understanding of science becomes predominant, the imperative to produce supportive work tends to override the production of coherent, defensible research. As we’ve seen in countless examples, from the Ecological Footprint to the Planetary Boundaries hypothesis to Howarth’s fugitive methane research to Mark Jacobson’s disgraced 100% wind/water/solar model , widespread expert debunking is no match for activist embrace of bullshit . All the more reason for experts to resist these activist narratives, no matter how powerful the incentives

The Climate Cost-Benefit Test

Climate economics is difficult. The purpose—determining the economic costs associated with global warming and its impacts—must first contend with the reality that, as anthropogenic emissions have pushed global average surface temperatures up over the past couple centuries, economic and other welfare outcomes for humanity have improved enormously.

Since 1800, global average surface temperature has risen by about 1.2 degrees Celsius. In that time, human population has expanded from around 1 billion to now over 8 billion, the energy consumption of human societies has risen by a factor of 30, total societal wealth has skyrocketed by almost a factor of 100, average lifespans have more than doubled, and democratic freedom has become the norm, not the rare exception, to human social existence.

Correlation is not causation. Indeed, no one credible would argue that global warming caused the unprecedented expansion of human well-being. But there are strong, even mainstream, reasons to believe that the industrial-scale use of fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming, did. So this is not to suggest that climate change itself is good for humanity, but rather that a) it is not at first approximation associated with absolute negative outcomes for humanity as a whole (at least not yet) and b) that establishing a negative relationship requires further empirical and statistical analysis.

And it is precisely that kind of analysis that earned William Nordhaus the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nordhaus’s integrated climate-economic model, which was the first of its kind when he published it in 1990, weighed the obvious benefits of fossil fuel exploitation (see above) against the costs of atmospheric warming that fossil fuel emissions produce. Nordhaus’s original model concluded that the social optimum—the equilibrium beyond which the costs of warming would exceed the benefits of fossil fuel usage—would be about somewhere between three and four degrees C by the end of the 21st century. Over time, Nordhaus has lowered that estimate to around 2.5 degrees C, which, of course, significantly exceeds the prominent two-degree C target, as well as more recent 1.5 C aspirations.

Nordhaus’s critics argued that his imputed social discount rate was too high, and he underestimated the long-tail risks of climate change, but these criticisms largely relied on the same integrated climate-economic modeling framework that he pioneered. In more recent years, though, Nordhaus and his approach to climate risk have become somewhat verboten among climate advocates. To an activist and scholarly community dedicated to rapidly abolishing fossil fuel use, weighing the costs against the benefits of fossil fuels is an exercise in “predatory delay.”

And yet, the academic and theoretical basis for rapid near-term abolition remained thin. Thousands of papers estimate economic climate damages, but they largely find that the costs of climate change will at most cut 20% off GDP that is expected to otherwise double to quadruple.

Juking the Climate Stats

So how does this new paper arrive at its much more severe estimates of the damage of climate change, and why should they be treated with extreme skepticism? It’s worth taking a step back to try to understand the logic of the paper. The research goes back to the basic relationship between global temperature and global GDP per capita and purports to find a huge effect that nobody else has ever found before. This is a notable claim because the barriers to analyzing time series of global temperature and global GDP are very small. Presumably, this is where the vast majority of climate-economics researchers would start looking for a relationship.

This is how the logic of the paper works.

• The authors identify that there are ~0.1°C year-to-year variations above and below the long-term warming trend in global temperature.
• When they use a very specific combination of data processing that has not been used in this context before (e.g., construct ‘temperature shocks’ with a ‘Hamilton filter’), they find an association between a ~0.1°C yearly rise in temperature above the long-term trend and a ~1.2% reduction in GDP per capita six years later . This is a reduction in GDP per capita relative to what it would be otherwise (not a reduction relative to the year of the temperature shock).
• Then, they assume that these yearly ~0.1°C variations about the long-term trend are perfect analogies for long-term climate change, whereas the actual long-term trend (which is literally long-term climate change) is not.

Why has the purported large relationship between global average temperature and GDP not been identified before? A straightforward explanation is that the results are very method-dependent in the sense that they disappear if different strategies are used to investigate the same question. That does not lend strong support for the supposed effects being real.

Using extrapolations from these 0.1°C variations and various other assumptions, they calculate, for example, that the 0.75°C warming from 1960 to 2022 has suppressed GDP per capita by 37% over that time. Also, somewhat astonishingly, their derived relationships suggest that warming is universally bad, and thus, the economy would have grown that much more had the climate been cooling instead of warming.

The paper goes on to make perplexing claims about the impact of global temperatures on local weather in an effort to explain why its analysis arrives at different results from previous work. In particular, it invokes global temperature as a causal mechanism, which impacts your country's climate in a way where it somehow largely avoids impacting your country's temperature.

“It turns out that global temperature has much more pronounced impacts on [local] economic activity than local temperature.”

For example, when discussing extreme heat at the level of an individual country, the paper says,

“Local temperature shocks lead to an increase in the share of extreme heat days. However, global temperature shocks lead to a substantially larger increase in extreme heat days.”

So the claim is that when the globe has a particularly warm year (relative to the long-term trend), it typically causes your country to see a spike in extreme heat days even when your country is not experiencing a particularly warm year. This would be possible if long-term warming were associated with major widenings of daily temperature distributions such that increases in extreme cold canceled out increases in extreme heat. But if anything, we see the opposite: extreme daily cold is rapidly becoming less extreme (milder) over land, suggesting a narrowing of daily temperature distributions. Note that the working paper completely ignores any (presumably positive) impact of extreme cold becoming milder.

The paper also makes similar claims about changes in extreme precipitation and extreme wind. But in order to assess the impact of climate change on floods (the result of extreme precipitation that would impact the economy) and extreme wind, we don't need a new convoluted methodology involving the construction of ‘global temperature shocks’ with Hamilton filters; we should instead look at long-term trends in these phenomena.

For floods, we see a substantial diversity in the direction of trends , and overall, most observational studies show no increase in floods globally and, if anything , show decreases . The IPCC essentially says that it is a wash and concludes:

“There is low confidence about peak flow trends over past decades on the global scale, but there are regions experiencing increases, including parts of Asia, Southern South America, north-east USA, north-western Europe, and the Amazon, and regions experiencing decreases, including parts of the Mediterranean, Australia, Africa, and south-western USA.”

For extreme winds, the balance of evidence suggests long-term decreases globally, not increases. Here’s what the IPCC says about historical changes in extreme winds:

“In summary, the observed intensity of extreme winds is becoming less severe in the low to mid-latitudes, while becoming more severe in high latitudes poleward of 60 degrees (low confidence).”

To remind you, a scant amount of the economy is poleward of 60 degrees: essentially only Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Nordic countries, northern Russia, and Antarctica.

Furthermore, studies on the economic damage from extreme weather consistently show that observed upward trends are the result of increased value exposed. When this is accounted for , we consistently see decreasing economic damage per unit of GDP exposed and less damage per unit of GDP exposed for higher-income countries.

Regardless of the specific methodological peculiarities, this paper suffers from a common shortcoming across climate economics, which is a complete negligence of long-term economic, technological, social, and political developments. Consider a climate economist in 1924 trying to calculate the effects of the 1.3°C of warming over the next century. At the time, even in one of the richest countries in the world, the United States , only 33% of people had electricity, 28% had an automobile, 20% had a flushing toilet, and 34% had a phone. Nobody had a refrigerator or, of course, modern communication devices. These things may seem tangential to climate adaptation, but basic standards of living and technology make societies more resilient to all aspects of a climate. In order to truly estimate the costs of climate change, that 1924 climate economist would have had to anticipate, or at least reasonably account for, all these relevant developments that took place over the century.

So yes, doing climate economics is hard.

Activist Research

Discussing their paper in a recent episode of The Climate Pod, titled Groundbreaking Economic Study Suggests Greater Climate Damages , Diego Känzig explains why they are sympathetic to finding much bigger impacts than previous studies.

“When we read the newspapers and when we listen to the scientists, climate change is always portrayed as this existential threat that poses significant risks to our lives, livelihoods, and also the economy, but then when you look at these previous estimates, it doesn't look too severe so that was a tension and it's why when we arrived at these estimates they aligned better with my priors.”

Indeed, but we can't help but wonder if the authors of this paper have their priors skewed by consuming the climate reporting of particular newspapers and particular high-profile public-facing climate scientists . This would be a straightforward explanation for why they might appear unaware of relevant IPCC findings.

With the above priors as a foundation, the authors seem to go out of their way to frame their results to be as politically expedient and salient as possible.

“Our results indicate that the impact of climate change is substantial. In welfare terms, the cost of climate change is 640 times the cost of business cycles, or ten times the cost of moving from current trade relations to complete autarky. Perhaps most strikingly, in terms of output, capital, consumption, and thus welfare, climate change is comparable in magnitude to the effect of fighting a major war domestically. However, climate change is permanent. Thus, the losses from living in a world with climate change relative to a world without it are comparable to fighting a major war domestically, forever.”

"For instance, under conventional estimates based on local shocks, the domestic cost of carbon of the United States is $30/tCO2, making unilateral emissions reduction prohibitively expensive. Under our new estimates, however, the domestic cost of carbon of the United States becomes $211/tCO2 and thus largely exceeds policy costs. In that case, unilateral decarbonization policy becomes cost-effective for the United States."

Passages like this indicate that the authors had an affinity for their calculations and sought to frame them in a way that maximized attention and support from climate activists. The desirability of these conclusions from the author’s perspective, combined with their dependence on a very specific methodology that has serious technical and conceptual problems, should elicit skepticism from anyone who knows this field or, for that matter, human nature.

But instead of skepticism, we’ve seen cheerleading from swaths of environmental journalists and even economists. What explains this?

Climate activists have a committed tendency to exaggerate the dangers of climate change, asserting that the Earth will soon become uninhabitable to humans or that runaway global warming will kick in after global average temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees of warming. And while the continued invocation of these debunked ideas is perhaps understandable from card-carrying activists, science and academia are at least supposed to enforce better standards. Though it is sometimes buried under hundreds of pages of dense research, consensus climate science synthesized by venues like the IPCC, and consensus climate economics synthesized by venues like the EPA, have offered robust correctives to these apocalyptic activist imaginaries.

In the text of their paper, Bilal and Känzig come right out and say they find these correctives unacceptable, and attempt to “reconcile” activist perceptions with the academic consensus. But in order to upend decades of scholarship, emergent from thousands of studies, they have to rely on conceptually bizarre, poorly-justified economic methods.

Episodes like this one reveal the threats to substantive research posed by activist commitments, and the incentive structure facing journalists and experts within the broader issue public. It shows how the imperative to produce work supportive of a predominant narrative can distort the aggregate output of a field, which then feeds back into the activist perceptions, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. To break the feedback loop and keep science as closely oriented towards truth-seeking as possible, experts must resist the temptation to cater to activist narratives, no matter how powerful the incentives are.

Alex Trembath

Alex Trembath is Deputy Director at Breakthrough.

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Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year

Since last May, the average person experienced 26 more days of abnormal warmth than they would have without global warming, a new analysis found.

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By Raymond Zhong

Over the past year of record-shattering warmth, the average person on Earth experienced 26 more days of abnormally high temperatures than they otherwise would have, were it not for human-induced climate change, scientists said Tuesday.

The past 12 months have been the planet’s hottest ever measured, and the burning of fossil fuels, which has added huge amounts of heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, is a major reason. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s population experienced at least 31 days of atypical warmth since last May as a result of human-caused warming, the researchers’ analysis found.

Hypothetically, had we not heated the globe to its current state , the number of unusually warm days would have been far fewer, the scientists estimated, using mathematical modeling of the global climate.

The precise difference varies place to place. In some countries, it is just two or three weeks, the researchers found. In others, including Colombia, Indonesia and Rwanda, the difference is upward of 120 days.

“That’s a lot of toll that we’ve imposed on people,” said one of the researchers who conducted the new analysis, Andrew Pershing, the vice president for science at Climate Central, a nonprofit research and news organization based in Princeton, N.J., adding, “It’s a lot of toll that we’ve imposed on nature.” In parts of South America and Africa, he said, it amounts to “120 days that just wouldn’t be there without climate change.”

Currently, the world’s climate is shifting toward the La Niña phase of the cyclical pattern known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. This typically portends cooler temperatures on average. Even so, the recent heat could have reverberating effects on weather and storms in some places for months to come. Forecasters expect this year’s Atlantic hurricane season to be extraordinarily active, in part because the ocean waters where storms form have been off-the-charts warm.

The analysis issued Tuesday was a collaboration between several groups: Climate Central, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and World Weather Attribution, a scientific initiative that examines extreme weather episodes. The report’s authors considered a given day’s temperature to be abnormally high in a particular location if it exceeded 90 percent of the daily temperatures recorded there between 1991 and 2020.

The average American experienced 39 days of such temperatures as a result of climate change since last May, the report found. That’s 19 more days than in a hypothetical world without human-caused warming. In some states, including Arizona and New Mexico in the Southwest and Washington and Oregon in the Northwest, the difference is 30 days or more, a full extra month.

The scientists also tallied up how many extreme heat waves the planet had experienced since last May. They defined these as episodes of unseasonable warmth across a large area, lasting three or more days, with significant loss of life or disruption to infrastructure and industry.

In total, the researchers identified 76 such episodes over the past year, affecting 90 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. There was the punishing hot spell in India last spring. There was the extreme heat that worsened wildfires and strained power grids in North America, Europe and East Asia last summer. And, already this year, there has been excessive warmth from Africa to the Middle East to Southeast Asia .

Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times. More about Raymond Zhong

Our Coverage of Climate and the Environment

News and Analysis

Human-caused warming has doubled the chances that southern Brazil will experience extreme, multiday downpours  like the ones that recently caused disastrous flooding there, a team of scientists said.

Over the past year of record-shattering warmth, the average person on Earth experienced 26 more days of abnormally high temperatures  than they otherwise would have, were it not for human-induced climate change, scientists said.

The Biden administration laid out for the first time a set of broad government guidelines around the use of carbon offsets  in an attempt to shore up confidence in a method for tackling global warming that has faced growing criticism.

Adopting Orphaned Oil Wells:  Students, nonprofit groups and others are fund-raising to cap highly polluting oil and gas wells  abandoned by industry.

Struggling N.Y.C. Neighborhoods:  New data projects are linking social issues with global warming. Here’s what that means for five communities in New York .

Biden Environmental Rules:  The Biden administration has rushed to finalize 10 major environmental regulations  to meet its self-imposed spring deadline.

F.A.Q.:  Have questions about climate change? We’ve got answers .

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• 22 May 2024

Singapore Airlines turbulence: why climate change is making flights rougher

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Carissa Wong is a science journalist in London.

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Emergency masks were deployed during the Singapore Airlines flight that experienced severe turbulence this week, killing one man. Credit: Reuters

Severe turbulence on a Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore has left a 73-year-old man dead and injured more than 70 people. The incident, although rare, is raising questions about what caused such a serious disruption to the flight — and whether climate change will make the strength and frequency of turbulence on planes worse.

The plane, which departed on 20 May, experienced a sudden drop of around more than 1,800 metres that launched people and objects towards the cabin roof. It is the airline’s first fatal incident in 24 years.

“Severe turbulence is the one that turns you into a projectile,” says atmospheric researcher Paul Williams at Reading University, UK. “For anyone not wearing a seatbelt it would have been a bit like being on a rollercoaster without any restraint in place — it would have been terrifying,” he says.

Nature looks at the science of air turbulence and how climate change will influence it.

What causes turbulence in aeroplanes?

Most flights experience some level of turbulence. Near the ground, strong winds around the airport can cause turbulence as planes take off or land. At higher altitudes, up- and downwards flows of air in storm clouds can cause mild to severe turbulence as planes fly through or near them. “Nobody likes flying through a storm,” says Williams.

Air flows that move upwards over mountain ranges can also create turbulence. “As the air blows over the mountain, the plane gets lifted up and can become turbulent,” says Williams. Moreover, turbulence often occurs on the edges of jet streams, which are strong air currents that circle the globe. Any turbulence that occurs outside of clouds is called “clear air” turbulence. It could take weeks to establish what kind of turbulence caused the Singapore Airlines incident, says Williams. “Provisionally, there was a storm nearby, but also the conditions were right for clear air turbulence — we need to do some more digging before we can say,” he says.

Damage in the galley of the Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 aeroplane. Credit: Reuters

Is climate change making turbulence worse and more frequent?

Climate change is making turbulence more frequent and severe, says atmospheric researcher Jung-Hoon Kim at Seoul National University.

In a study published last year 1 , Williams and his colleagues found large increases in clear-air turbulence between 1979 and 2020. Over the North Atlantic, severe clear-air turbulence — which is stronger than Earth’s gravity — became 55% more frequent. There were similar increases in turbulence all over the world, he says. The increase is almost certainly the result of climate change, which is strengthening the jet streams that cause turbulence, says Williams. “We already know it’s having an impact,” he says.

In another study 2 , Williams and his colleagues used a climate model to predict that clear-air turbulence would become more severe and frequent as the climate warms. The researchers estimated that severe turbulence would increase in frequency more than light or moderate levels of turbulence. In line with this, Kim and his colleagues found that clear-air turbulence around clouds and mountains would become more frequent with climate change, in a study published last year.

Despite the probable rise in turbulence, most flights will carry on as they do now — with light or mild turbulence, says Williams. “It is not that we’ll have to stop flying, or planes will start falling out of the sky,” says Williams. “I’m just saying that for every 10 minutes, you’ve spent in severe turbulence in the past, it could be 20 or 30 minutes in the future,” says Williams.

Can we predict and prevent bad turbulence?

Pilots use turbulence projections to plan flight paths. Researchers at weather centres can predict turbulence based on data collected from ground-based sensors and satellites and communicate predictions to pilots. On the plane, pilots use radar to identify storm clouds to avoid. This relies on radiowaves being sent out from the aircraft, which are then reflected back towards sensors that map out the surrounding area.

But radar cannot detect cloudless clear air turbulence. Another technology called LiDAR could help, says Williams. “LiDAR is similar to radar but uses a different wavelength of light,” says Williams, “Unfortunately it’s expensive, and requires a big heavy box, but it can see invisible clear air turbulence.” If the box can be miniaturised and the cost comes down, it could soon be used, he says. “I’ve seen some experimental flights, and you can indeed see clear air turbulence 20 miles, for example, ahead of the aircraft,” he says.

Until then, “I hope that everybody when they travel, please fasten your seat belts,” says Kim.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01542-2

Prosser, M. C., Williams, P. D., Marlton, G. J. & Harrison, R. G. Geophys. Res. Lett. 50 , e2023GL103814 (2023).

Article   Google Scholar  

Storer, L. N., Williams, P. D. & Joshi, M. M. Geophys. Res. Lett . 44 , 9976–9984 (2017).

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