Equilibrium
Towards a New Global Architecture for Climate Finance
Human Climate Niches at 2.7C warming
Since its inception, Radical Ecology has been in dialogue with actors working at the forefront of the intergovernmental dialogue on climate change including Barbados, the UN Climate Champions team, the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, the Institute for Sustainable Resources at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, Bauhaus Earth the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, BRAC and the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, to develop a global understanding of why the dialogue to-date has failed to deliver on the climate action needed to limit global warming to 1.5˚C and to put forward proposed solutions commensurate with the scale of the problem we face.
Initiatives such as Addressing the New Denialism, in collaboration with the Global Systems Institute and Serpentine Back to Earth and the Equilibrium round-table gathering, hosted by the Nicoletta Fiorrucci Foundation in London in July 2022, have worked to establish a global community for change cutting across the leading edges of climate science, development economics and international policy. We have been prominent advocates for the Bridgetown Initiative and have contributed to the formulation of new methodologies that have driven the influential 2023 paper published in Nature Sustainability, Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming. Our work also helped to frame the Global Tipping Points report, launched at COP28.
Building on such partnerships and intellectual foundations, Equilibrium: Towards a new global architecture for climate finance puts forwards a synthesis of recent thinking in a concise report for the year the world must agree a new climate finance goal. Equilibrium will consider the impact of Barbados’s proposed package for climate finance in the light of leading edge thinking from the climate science community relating to tipping points and the human climate niche.
Assessing the extent to which the Bridgetown Initiative could support a “positive tipping point” in the mitigation of climate change, Equilibrium will explore what, in addition, would need to be considered for a credible global architecture for climate finance fit for the 2020s and beyond.
Central to this piece of work is a critique of “delayism”, an approach to the governance of climate change that has been informed by economic models advanced by the 2018 Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus and that has influenced decision-makers in government and business to consider the cost-benefit of delayed action and even no action in response to rising atmospheric temperatures. Our work demonstrates how the past decade has revealed delayism to be scientifically erroneous and environmentally disastrous, perpetuating approaches to intergovernmental climate action that have entirely failed to place appropriate value on the dignity and equality of human life.
Plenary Discussion at the Equilibrium Round-table, 8 July 2022.
Report: Global Tipping points
Our work helped to frame the Global Tipping Points report, launched at COP28 on Wednesday 6th December 2023. Based on an assessment of 26 negative Earth system tipping points, the report concludes that “business as usual” is no longer acceptable, with rapid changes to nature and societies already happening, and more on the way.
The report’s authors warn that damage to the natural world will leave societies overwhelmed unless world leaders, who are meeting at COP28, take urgent action to halt the climate and biodiversity crises and steer us towards positive tipping points.
The Global Tipping Points Report makes six key recommendations:
Phase out fossil fuels and land-use emissions well before 2050.
Strengthen adaptation and “loss and damage” governance, recognising inequality between and within nations.
Include tipping points in the Global Stocktake (the world’s climate ‘inventory’) and each country’s efforts to tackle climate change.
Coordinate policy efforts to trigger positive tipping points
As the Global Tipping Points work makes clear, we need to find new approaches to climate governance to meet the nature and quality of the existential challenges we now face. To do that, we need to understand the interrelated dynamics of vulnerabilities: those that exist now, and those that may exist into the future.
We need a new approach grounded in the latest understanding from earth system sciences, from which we can collectively craft a new architecture for global climate finance rooted in an understanding of the differential impacts of the climate and biodiversity crises across geographies, social strata and generations. Radical Ecology’s Equilibrium programme is bringing together the conversations, and the alliances, that can bring that into being.
Plenary Discussion at the Equilibrium Round-table, 8 July 2022
Report: Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming
Radical Ecology contributed to the formulation of new methodologies that shaped the influential 2023 paper published in Nature Sustainability, Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming.
Global commitments on climate finance continue to fall short of the $100 billion/year promised by the world’s richest nations in Copenhagen in 2009, indicating a growing deficit that continues to push the escalating burden of climate impacts onto those who are most vulnerable and least responsible for causing climate change. Led by the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in collaboration with Radical Ecology, Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming asked how best to quantify this rising inequality in order to strengthen future policymaking.
Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming acknowledges first, how systems that have underpinned the economics of climate change and guided policy and government decision-making have often reinforced this dynamic by emphasising the projected cost of climate change in monetary and not primarily human terms, therefore placing a greater value on climate impacts suffered by the rich than the poor and placing greater value on current over future generations (because future damages are subject to economic discounting).
Rooted in the principle that the lives of all humans, whether rich or poor, young or old, should be valued equally, the approach set out in the paper yields radically different numbers and a very different perspective on the value of urgent action when faced with the crisis of global heating.
PROJECT EVENTS
Equilibrium: Roundtable
Nicoletta , 28th July 2022
A round-table hosted by Radical Ecology, responding to recent calls by the Prime Minister of Barbados for a new global architecture for climate finance that is fit for the need of the 2020s and beyond.
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