Intensifying climate change impacts can divert the economic resources away from emission reduction toward adaptation to reduce rising damages, jeopardizing temperature stabilization within safe levels. Indeed, the traditional static welfare-maximizing climate policy design leads to a conflict between mitigation and adaptation, invalidating the recently established consistency of cost-benefit analysis with the Paris Agreement's targets. Here, we show that this tension can be resolved by integrating multi-objective optimization and feedback control in the Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy model to design self-adaptive climate policies trading off welfare maximization with the Paris Agreement compliance. These policies allow adjusting against uncertainty as information on the socio-climatic system accumulates, thus representing the policy-making process more realistically. We show that, the costs being the same as in traditional methods, warming above 2 degrees C and the probability of overshooting can be drastically reduced, emphasizing the need for integrating adaptation and mitigation strategies and the value of embracing a self-adaptive, multi-objective perspective.
Carlino, A; Tavoni, M; Castelletti, A
Self-Adaptive Multi-Objective Climate Policies Align Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies
Earths Future