Accounting for risk transitions of ocean ecosystems under climate change: an economic justification for more ambitious p
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Accounting for risk transitions of ocean ecosystems under climate change: an economic justification for more ambitious policy responses Daiju Narita 1,2
3
& Hans-Otto Poertner & Katrin Rehdanz
4
Received: 3 May 2019 / Accepted: 10 June 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Despite the ocean’s role in regulating the climate and providing ecosystem services, the importance of the ocean has only recently gained appropriate attention in the context of international climate change policies. This concerns the impacts of climate change on ocean ecosystems and the role of the ocean in climate change mitigation. Since impacts can be cumulative, future climate risks for the ocean and dependent human communities emphasize the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here, we make the case that assessing these impacts and their consequences for human welfare would provide not only an ethical but also an economic justification for strengthening policy responses to a substantial degree. Keywords Climate change . Ocean change . Climate policy . Ocean acidification . The social cost of carbon . Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) . Risk transition Large proportions of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by human activities accumulate in the atmosphere, and the resultant changes of the climate system cause climate impacts both on land and in the ocean. For about 30 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has systematically assessed the evidence of climate change, its impacts, and potential policy implications. The importance of climate action was taken up by the United Nations’ Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-02002763-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Daiju Narita [email protected]–tokyo.ac.jp
1
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
2
Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Kiel, Germany
3
Integrative Ecophysiology, Alfred-Wegener-Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany
4
Department of Economics, Kiel University, Kiel, Germany
Climatic Change
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) where the urgency to combat climate change and its impacts is included as one of the 17 goals (United Nations 2015). A Special Report of the IPCC on global warming of 1.5 °C (Masson-Delmotte et al., IPCC 2018) stressed the critical importance of the next 10 years in limiting climate change, emphasized most recently by an IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (Pörtner et al., IPCC 2019). Despite the ocean’s role in regulating the climate and providing ecosystem services, the importance of the ocean has thus only recently gained importance in the discussion of climate change policies, considering impacts of sea level rise as well as climate change impacts on ocean biology and fisheries in the context of impacts at global and regional scales (e.g., Pörtner et al. 2014, 2019, Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2014, 201
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