Adaptive mitigation strategies hedge against extreme climate futures

Climate. To hedge or not against an uncertain climate future?

I t has been over a decade since Nordhaus (1) published his seminal paper on mitigation policy for climate change. His question was “To slow or not to slow?”; his answer was derived from a traditional costbenefit approach. He found that a tax levied on fossil fuel in proportion to its carbon content, which would climb over time at roughly the rate of interest, maximized global welfare. Although...

Restoring Predators as a Hedge against Climate Change

Climate change and the loss of ecologically relevant large terrestrial carnivore populations are two important challenges currently facing conservation practitioners (Ray et al. 2005, Sutherland et al. 2009). Little attention is given, however, to how these two problems might be related, and how mitigation eff orts for each might be united. Here we explain how predators cannot only infl uence t...

Adaptive Hedge

Most methods for decision-theoretic online learning are based on the Hedge algorithm, which takes a parameter called the learning rate. In most previous analyses the learning rate was carefully tuned to obtain optimal worst-case performance, leading to suboptimal performance on easy instances, for example when there exists an action that is significantly better than all others. We propose a new...

Adaptive Strategies for Climate Change

Investigating afforestation and bioenergy CCS as climate change mitigation strategies

The land-use sector can contribute to climate change mitigation not only by reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but also by increasing carbon uptake from the atmosphere and thereby creating negative CO2 emissions. In this paper, we investigate two land-based climate change mitigation strategies for carbon removal: (1) afforestation and (2) bioenergy in combination with carbon capture and s...