Rapid climate transformation requires transformative policy and science thinking—An editorial essay

Abstract

The recent publication of the Sixth Assessment Report on Climate Change (AR6) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (IPCC, 2021) reveals an increasingly difficult challenge: the nature and rate of change in the world's climate due to human activity is occurring at a pace faster than the best science and research is organized to report. Successive IPCC reports, for example, document changes that often are out of date by the time it takes the Panel to organize an assessment. serious problems with policy designs that rely on known current costs and which will almost certainly be wrong tomorrow. And, even more concerning, policy designs built on the knowns of social and economic valuation imply that climate change is an incremental process. From the available evidence, this assumption is clearly no longer valid. Policy designs need to immediately move away from approaches meant to balance incremental social and economic costs and benefits and face the reality of “ compounding extremes ” (a concept introduced in the latest IPCC report).