This section considers the issue of whether to mitigate or not to mitigate on Human response to Environmental Changes. There are two approaches involved in responding to climate change and these are mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is defined as reduction in the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which can be done either by decreasing sources of these gases or increasing the “sinks” that accumulate and store these gases.
Adaptation is defined as adjusting to actual or expected future climate (United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014a; United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014b).
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The world has become a global village and whatever happens in any part of the world has a spillover effect to other part of the world within a shorter period of time.
The U.S. energy use which threatened the global environmental change is a good example of an issue which later became a matter of urgent concern to the whole world.
The most important consequence of global change is conflict, so the debate on responses to a global change is between advocates of immediate mitigation to the issue of global warming and those who would want it to be postponed to the future date.
According to the National Research Council (1992), the following are some of the arguments raised by those proponents who suggested the postponement of mitigation on the issue of global environmental change to future date:
i. There is uncertainty about global change – there is incomplete knowledge of the relevant properties of the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, and other relevant systems that make up the global warming, hence there is uncertainty about its future occurrence. Therefore, expending resources now to prevent changes that may not occur in future can be wasteful and the mitigation efforts may bring about undesirable changes.
ii. Adjustment may make Mitigation to be unnecessary – this means that there is tendency for the human systems to adjust to global climatic changes much faster than they are likely to occur. The doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels has been forecasted, will take place about 80 years from now. This is in contrast to the situation in financial markets that will adjust in minutes, administered-market prices in weeks and the labour markets in years. This implies that what the individuals and organizations will do in anticipating climate change may be enough that organized, governmental responses will be unnecessary.
iii. May result to fighting the wrong war – the level of technological and social changes can remove certain problems without the use of any mitigation efforts through the change in the offending technology or the obsolescence of the technology. For example, there is no more explosion of boilers in trains because the steam engines are no more in use.
iv. Possibility of Better policy options – the discovery of more effective and less costly interventions than those now available through research, may discourage the use of any future mitigating efforts for the global change.
v. Possibility of taking action now may be more costly – the proponents suggest that the postponement of action to the future will be less costly because of continuing economic progress. They believe that if people had invested in the past to prevent today's environmental problems, their expense would probably have been made on the wrong problems. This would have amounted to an inequitable transfer of resources from a poorer generation to a richer one.
The Proponents of immediate mitigative action put forward the following arguments:
i. Immediate action is more feasible and effective: the proponents argue that taking immediate action is more effective than postponing it to later date. This can be in terms of cost, damage and loss that may result from delaying action till later period.
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The delaying of policy actions can lead to costs or economic damages such as costs to health, costs from sea level rise, and harm from increasingly severe storms, droughts, and wildfires. These costs are borne by the present and future generations (National Research Council,1992; Furman, 2014).
ii. It encourages adjustment to slower change: immediate action is judicious because of the longtime lags in the global environmental system which make it easier to adjust to change gradually. There is usually long-time delay in getting the effect of global change, so by the time it becomes clear that a response is needed; it may be too late to prevent catastrophe, most especially if the change occurs very fast. In a situation where there is no possibility of catastrophe happening, mitigation which slows the rate of change can be made in time. For example, the nonhuman organisms such as tree can adjust to climatic change by migrating, as seedlings move to more favorable locations. This is also the case with human adjustments to major environmental change.
iii. It serves as insurance against disaster: immediate policy action in the face of possible catastrophic outcomes is like taking out insurance against flood and fire.
The insurance expenses are manageable, but the expenses of catastrophe may not be easily quantified.
iv. It prevents irretrievable error: there is need for immediate policy action to be taken against potentially irretrievable losses, most especially in situation that may call for species extinction. There are some species that are valued for themselves and their loss is irretrievable; there are also those valued only for what benefits they may have for humanity; which loss may be irretrievable. Generally, there is need for immediate mitigation efforts for these species not to be lost.
v. It prevents high-risk environmental experiments: there are various efforts that are now made in conducting large-scale uncontrolled experiments on the global environment by changing the face of the earth and the flows of critical materials at remarkable rates. There is need to limit the pace and extent of such experiments because of the unexpected consequences that may follow. Also, there is possibility that most of these experiments are likely going to fail. There is support for any mitigation efforts that will slow ongoing human interventions in the environment, but generally not those that would stop global warming change.
vi. Economic arguments do not take into consideration some environmental goods:
The environmental goods are non-market goods, such as clean air, clean water, landscape, green transport infrastructure, public parks, urban parks, rivers, mountains, forests, and beaches. They are a sub-category of public goods. The fact remains that the costs and benefits of postponing action are not always similar, for instance, where the current economic activity damage the human life support systems, it may be impossible to determine the cost that may result from this loss.
Economic arguments cannot deal with some things like the balance of nature;
which is the stable state that natural communities of animals and plants exist, maintained by adaptation, competition, and other interactions between the members of these communities and their nonliving environment.
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The balance of nature may be in terms of benefit which people place on intrinsic or spiritual value. In a situation where people want to preserves such values, mitigation will be the only acceptable approach.
vii. Other justification: this includes the investments in energy efficiency that provide an excellent return on investment even with narrow economic calculations. This may achieve the benefits of mitigation at no extra cost, while providing other benefits (National Research Council,1992).
Self-Assessment Exercise
What is mitigation and why may it be postponed to address global environmental change in the future?