4.2: The Six Clusters

Although the time to act is limited, you and the million other climate champions still have a range of solutions you can employ to avoid dangerous warming of the planet. So, how do you go about bending the warming curve?

Major emission sources will need to be addressed in all sectors, including electricity generation, residential and commercial buildings, transportation, and industrial processes. Solutions will require collaborative efforts on unprecedented scales, not only by scientists and engineers, but also by civic, business, and religious leaders, as well as community members. Given the wide range of impacts, emitting sectors, and areas of expertise required, you need some sort of organizing principle to sort through potential solutions, rank them, and identify the groups or institutions best qualified to carry them out. The approach outlined in Bending the Curve’s executive summary and used in this book is to lay out ten broad solutions, organized into six major solutions clusters.

Development of the six clusters

The 50 interdisciplinary University of California experts who came together in the summer of 2015 quickly concluded that a comprehensive approach requires solutions from a wide range of sectors and areas of expertise. They developed a set of ten broad solutions but found there was no single category that would cover them all. In the end, they grouped the ten solutions into six solutions clusters. The ten solutions represent ten actions that, taken together, can bend the curve and avoid dangerous warming of the planet. The six clusters represent the sectors and areas of expertise that will be needed to implement these solutions.

The six solutions clusters, listed in rough order of importance, are

1. Science Pathways Solutions
2. Societal Transformation Solutions
3. Governance Solutions
4. Market- and Regulation-Based Solutions
5. Technology-Based Solutions
6. Natural and Managed Ecosystem Solutions

This ranking does not mean that any of these clusters are optional; all will be needed in order to avoid dangerous warming. However, clusters ranked higher on the list are generally considered more fundamental; solutions clusters that appear lower on the list tend to be in some way dependent on the higher clusters. For example, science pathways solutions are placed first because without a scientific understanding of the causes of warming and the most effective emissions pathways for bending the warming curve, we would be unable to take meaningful actions.

In particular, Bending the Curve was the first report to rank societal transformation solutions so highly, listing it as the second solutions cluster. There were several motivations for this high ranking. Without broad-based societal understanding of the risks and potential impacts of climate change, there will not be sufficient public support to implement governance, economic, and technological solutions. Social movements can energize individuals by bringing them together to act for broader interests. Moreover, some of the individuals and groups most vulnerable to climate change typically have little voice in global governance and economic mechanisms. Social movements and collective action can help ensure their concerns are heard and addressed. Finally, many of the solutions we will examine are dependent on the collective impact of individual actions and choices. Realizing these solutions will require a transformation of our societal attitudes toward each other and toward nature.

Intragenerational and intergenerational equity

There is one more important issue that we need to consider before we look at our ten solutions. Fundamental to the development and evaluation of climate solutions is consideration of equity: whether the distribution of benefits and harm caused by our actions is fundamentally fair. Note that equity is not the same as equality: for example, distributing an equal amount of food to everyone in a group might not be seen as equitable if some have overflowing refrigerators while others are starving. Discussions of equity are ultimately based in ethics and personal values, and different observers might reach different conclusions as to whether a particular situation is equitable or not. However, most people seem to believe that it is fundamentally unfair for those who did not share in the benefits of an activity to be burdened with its costs or other negative impacts.

In the context of climate change, there are two important aspects of equity to consider: intergenerational equity and intragenerational equity.

Intergenerational equity refers to equity between different generations, for example, between us and our grandchildren or their descendants. It essentially considers equity between groups of people who are separated in time. The impacts of our current emissions will not be felt only in this century. A large fraction of the carbon dioxide we emit now by burning fossil fuels will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds and even thousands of years, meaning that unborn generations will have to deal with its impacts even though current generations received the benefits of the energy produced. If warming pushes the Earth’s climate past one or more tipping points, it could well become impossible to return our planet to the temperatures of the relatively stable Holocene climate in which human civilizations developed and flourished (Section 1.1).

Figure 4.2.1 Rich and poor communities living side by side in Mumbai, India. Photograph reproduced with permission from Johnny Miller.

Intragenerational equity refers to equity between individuals who are alive now but separated by location (for example, living in different countries) or social factors (for example, belonging to different economic classes). Among those alive on Earth today, there are billions who have largely been left behind by the technological advances of the past few centuries. We can divide the roughly 7.5 billion people living on Earth into three broad groups:

• The top 1 billion are the most economically well off. Their consumption of fossil fuels contributes roughly 50% of global CO₂ pollution.
• The bottom 3 billion have very limited access to fossil fuels and the energy they produce. This group contributes only 5% of global CO₂ pollution. We refer to these as the “bottom” 3 billion, not in any pejorative sense, but because they represent the least affluent of the Earth’s population and are at the bottom of the economic and energy pyramids. On a per-person basis, they emit about one-thirtieth as much as individuals in the top 1 billion, but they are often the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
• The middle 3.5 billion are neither the poorest nor the richest; their situation is intermediate between the top 1 billion and the bottom 3 billion. Their per-person emissions are about ten times higher than the bottom 3 billion, but only about one-third of the top 1 billion.

Consider where you, your family, or your household might be classified among these groups. It will be helpful to keep this rough division in mind when evaluating the equitability of climate solutions and determining responsibilities for their implementation.

As Pope Francis noted in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, “[w]e are faced with not two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”