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Guest post: Why estimates of the ‘cost’ of climate action are overly pessimistic

Guest post: Why estimates of the ‘cost’ of climate action are overly pessimistic

Alexandre C. Köberle, Toon Vandyck, Céline Guivarch & Joeri Rogelj

Abstract

The “cost” of cutting greenhouse gas emissions is often used to argue that tackling climate change is expensive. But this provides a skewed image to policymakers and stakeholders.

In our paper, published in Nature Climate Change, we describe how treating climate impacts separately to the question of how to reduce emissions has created room for policymakers to focus only on the apparent cost of mitigation, ignoring the benefits of climate action.

With the release in a couple of weeks of the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on how to reduce emissions – known as mitigation – there is an opportunity to clarify these issues and ensure a more balanced conversation about the economics of tackling climate change.

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