The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has today published its Sixth Assessment Report on the mitigation of climate change. Written by leading climate scientists from around the world, it details the progress made in limiting global emissions and the available mitigation options across systems and sectors. It includes new chapters on social aspects of mitigation, innovation, technology, cross-sectoral mitigation opportunities and links and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation.
In response to the IPCC Working Group lll report ‘Mitigation of Climate Change’, Dr Amber Huff, Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, commented:
“Today’s IPCC report is a renewed call for action to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. There is no doubt of the urgent need to limit global emissions, but it can and must be done ways that support struggles for justice, respect people’s dignity and uphold people’s rights to resources and livelihoods.
“There must be a move away from ‘top-down’ one-size-fits-all technical mitigation ‘solutions’. Such approaches have consistently failed to achieve the radical and far-reaching changes that we know are necessary, and have also failed to protect people from vulnerability who live with day-to-day challenges of environmental change and its associated uncertainties.
“For example, initiatives such as the Sahelian ‘Great Green Wall’ and the AFR100 (African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative) commit to planting hundreds of millions of hectares of trees in Africa over the coming decade. However, our research with pastoralists shows that large-scale ‘top down’ projects such as mass tree planting can severely damage people’s livelihoods, pushing pastoralists and their animals away from the land they depend on for grazing. Listening to local voices, strengthening rights over land and water and ensuring accountability will create more sustainable environments than mass carbon offset schemes, such as large-scale tree-planting, and at a much lower cost.
“Rather than imposing frameworks that are developed at a great distance from people’s lived experiences, climate finance and mitigation policy must directly support members of communities to fully participate on their own terms in identifying and responding to environmental challenges. This means respecting the needs, rights, values and knowledge of people who directly depend on forests, land, waters and other natural resources. This not only includes people who identify as members of indigenous populations, but diverse groups of pastoralists, farmers, fishers, artisanal craftspeople and others, who are often excluded from having a say in debates about policies that directly impact their lives. Justice can and must be built alongside, rather than traded off against, emissions reductions.”
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