Varying Approaches

Global climate change is a global problem. It is affecting every area of the planet right now. It is affecting humans, plants, animals, chemical cycles, the atmosphere and ocean composition. Climate change is also a result of actions from every corner of the world, from the smoke stacks of China to the farming of a small village in Kenya to the running water that was left on by a child in Chicago. Climate change is the biggest problem that the human race has ever faced, simply because of its vast variety of causes and effects. So how do we fix it? The concept is simple, if we are all causing the problem and if we are all seeing the effects then we all have a responsibility to fix it.

In reality, however, it isn’t that easy. The first step to solving the climate change issue is to break down the world’s population into categories or “parties” of people that are more manageable. In Governing Climate Change, Harriet Bulkeley and Peter Newell describe three different ways of categorizing, as well as their pros and cons; the first by nation, second by causality, and third by layer.

The first way is simply by nation, just assign the responsibility to each of the governments. The problem with that strategy, however, is that all nations need to agree upon the steps that they want to take, and each nation has its own agenda. This can be seen in the separation and formation of parties within the Conference of Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. On one end of the spectrum is OPEC, “the coalition of states most hostile to action on climate change… with revenues almost entirely dependent on the export of oil” (Bulkeley, 18). On the other is AOSIS, “a coalition of island states most vulnerable to the effects of sea-rise [which] has been the most strident of the negotiating coalitions” (Bulkeley, 18). With such drastic opinions amongst parties and nations compromise is difficult.

The second way to categorize is through the distribution of “causality.” If we break the planet’s population down by those responsible for the most greenhouse gas production we end up with the key categories of multinational corporations and consumers. The main problem with this categorization is organization. With the dispersement of consumers and corporations around the world it is difficult to condense and regulate any sort of emission standards.

The last category, by layer, is a break down of responsibility into international, national, regional, and local arenas (and I’m even going to take that further into family and personal). I believe this categorization is the framework through which we should strategize. However, I do not negate the power of the other two strategies.

I believe that if we take the third set of categories and break them down by the first and second categories we arrive at a situation that can be successfully handled. For example, we can regulate emissions of consumers at a local level and move up from there. We can handle the emissions of multinational corporations at an international level and implement resulting regulations using regional strategies. We can also use this framework to build up the solution, making “causality” changes at a personal and familial level and carrying them to the local and regional levels and so on until we reach the national arena.

Global climate change is comprised of, as I stated at the beginning, a vast variety of causes and effects. Therefore, it is going to take a vast variety of strategies to fix it. So we need to keep an open mind and view the issue as an overlap of many different categories of people, leading to many possible approaches for solutions.

– Bulkeley, H., and P. Newell, 2010. Governing Climate Change. Routledge, New York.