October 13, 2012 — andyextance

Countries trying to agree climate deals based on avoiding dangerous ‘cliff-edge’ limits will not work. That’s according to Scott Barrett and Astrid Dannenberg from the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York, who’ve modelled the negotiations in a simple game. They found that uncertainty about the threshold at which their actions hurt everyone made players ignore the deals they made almost every time. “We found that if the threshold for catastrophic climate change were certain, Mother Nature would essentially enforce an agreement to avoid the threshold,” Scott told me. “The fear of falling off of a cliff disciplined everyone to do what was needed, collectively, to avoid falling off. When the threshold was uncertain, this effect collapsed. Uncertainty about the impact made no difference at all.” And with science unable to be completely certain where the limit is, Scott and Astrid think that how climate deals are put together must change.

Scott got the idea that knowing where the cliff-edge is important because of the two different ways climate can affect the world. The first is ‘gradual’, where small emissions add a little to greenhouse gas levels in the air and raise global temperatures slightly. The second is ‘abrupt and catastrophic’, where small emissions push part of the world’s climate over a limit into a new state. “The second kinds of change are more important to welfare,” he said. “The effects tend to be uniformly negative – think of 5 meters of sea level rise, or the possibility of warm temperatures releasing methane stored in tundra, causing a rapid rise in temperature. The effects also occur quickly, meaning that adaptation will be harder. For both reasons it seemed to me that countries would have a stronger reason to prevent this kind of climate change than the gradual kind.”

Pushing the limit

Other researchers had looked at what abrupt climate change meant for cooperation in climate deals. However they assumed the limit where it happened was certain, and that the sides in the deal couldn’t communicate. “We knew both assumptions were important and completely at odds with the situation we face,” Scott said. To fix this, Astrid and Scott got 400 students at the University of Magdeburg, Germany, to play games that mimicked, but did not mention, climate negotiations.

The students were split into groups of 10, playing and communicating anonymously through computers. Astrid and Scott gave them each €31 spread across three different accounts. The first had €1 they could spend on €0.10 poker chips, reflecting easy steps to fight climate change. The second they had €10 they could spend on €1 poker chips, which reflect more difficult measures. That meant they could buy up to 20 chips for €11, with the first ten much cheaper than the second. In the third account they had €20 that could not be spent at all. At the end of the game, they went away with the amount of money left in their accounts, plus or minus an amount that depended on how many chips the whole group had bought. Each student gained €0.05 per chip the group bought, representing the benefits of fighting gradual climate change. However, unless the chip total reached a “threshold” they would have between €10 and €20 taken away from them, reflecting the impact of catastrophic change.

There were three stages to the game. First each group of 10 students negotiated what everyone would put in. “Specifically, we let them propose how much everyone ought to do and pledge how much each of them will do,” Scott said. “We suspected that this would be important, and it was.” Then they decided what they would actually pay, and lastly they were told what everyone had paid, and what the outcome of their choices would be. To test the effects of uncertainty in the limit and overall impact, the groups were randomly assigned to four different scenarios. In one, the students knew the exact size of the fine and threshold chip total, and in another they only knew a range for both. In the final two scenarios they knew one exactly and a range for the other.

Defeating cheating

When the threshold was fixed beforehand at 150 chips, almost all groups avoided catastrophic change, with students giving almost exactly the 15 chips they pledged on average. When the threshold was an unknown random number between 100 and 200 chips, students proposed around 167 chips per group. However students actually pledged slightly less, around 15 chips per player, then each student actually only gave around 8 chips each on average. That meant none of these groups avoided catastrophe – though a few reduced the risk slightly, they were still below the random threshold. “They proposed less than needed to eliminate the risk of catastrophe, they pledged less than they proposed, and they contributed less than they pledged,” Astrid noted.

Though this behaviour could be related to other international deals, like on fisheries, space junk, or antibiotic use, it seems to have a clear parallel to climate change. Scott pointed out that historical climate records show polar ice sheets have disappeared in the past when CO2 levels in the air were between 350 and 550 parts per million (ppm). Today, levels are over 390 ppm. “Our model can be interpreted as saying that everyone knows they should keep concentrations below 350.” he said. “However, they propose something like 400, knowing that the individual incentives to deliver 350 are so weak that proposing that would lack credibility. Then, when they make individual pledges, if you add them up they come to about 450. Finally, when they make their contributions they go beyond 550, guaranteeing that the threshold is crossed.”

To avoid this situation, Scott and Astrid suggest that measures like trade restrictions could be used against countries who don’t live up to their climate pledges, as was done successfully in the deal to fight ozone layer damage. “We can all agree that the negotiations have failed,” Scott said. “What we need, however, is a proper diagnosis of the reasons. Our research offers a diagnosis. We can’t prove it’s correct, but it’s for someone else to show that it’s wrong. Only when we know the diagnosis can we prescribe a treatment. Our research suggests that climate negotiations need to be framed differently. The same approach has been tried for more than 20 years. It’s time to try a different approach.”

Scenario Mean average overall chip proposal Mean average student chip pledge Mean average group contribution Range of group contribution Certainty 151.9 (1.57) 14.7 (0.51) 150.9 (7.69) 136–159 Impact Uncertainty 149.1 (4.98) 14.4 (0.80) 155.5 (2.92) 152–161 Threshold Uncertainty 166.3 (9.85) 15.8 (1.69) 77.2 (16.67) 55–107 Impact-and-Threshold Uncertainty 167.0 (10.40) 15.5 (2.07) 79.9 (26.90) 44–120

Journal Reference

Scott Barrett and Astrid Dannenberg (2012). Climate negotiations under scientific uncertainty PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1208417109