Ros Taplin

Empowerment of individuals and realization of community agency: Applying action research to climate change responses in Australia

Using Participatory Action Research (PAR), the research presented here sought to resolve the problematic of whether climate group-initiated legislation could stimulate effective policy action on climate change. In late 2006, Australian public concern about the impacts of climate change and the Federal Government’s weak response became more pronounced due to increased media coverage and international developments. Locally based citizens’ ‘climate groups’ began to form, including Climate Action Coogee (CAC) in Sydney. CAC wrote their own Australian Climate Protection Bill after being motivated by the UK’s grassroots success in developing and promoting the UK Climate Change Bill. This article documents 10 months of the project, from inception to widespread grassroots endorsement and political awareness of the Bill. The use of PAR processes tested and further developed the theory of double-loop learning and its applicability to such a project. These processes allowed CAC coparticipants to experience a transformation in their agency through developing their personal and collective political power. The project contributed to legislative outcomes on climate change. The findings contribute to academic literature by demonstrating the effectiveness of PAR in guiding social movement campaigns.

Climate change, carbon prices and insurance systems

Market approaches to limit CO2e emissions such as carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes (ETSs) aim to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change by ascribing a financial cost to emissions. Yet such approaches have failed to establish either emissions limits or carbon prices equal to the task. We propose an approach to carbon pricing that better reflects the biogeophysical limits of the Earth system by drawing on aspects of insurance systems including forms of social insurance and the insurance industry. Our proposal achieves this by: (i) creating a financial liability link between current emissions and attributable near future losses; and (ii) applying Fraction Attributable Risk (FAR) analysis to determine the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to increased probability of experienced damaging weather events. Our proposal, a departure from current approaches to pricing CO2e emissions, has aspects that are consistent with existing forms of insurance. It requires participation by states and a small number of larger and established reinsurers. Our proposal provides both the scientific–technical capacity and the political–economic incentive to shift the anchor point for carbon prices away from pressing short-term political and economic considerations and closer to strategic ecological requirements for Earth system stability: the balance is shifted to favour changes in the global economy necessary to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change over current estimations of what is politically and economically feasible or desirable. Our proposal is an example of reflexive mitigation, grounded in complex adaptive systems theory, and centres on relationships between the Earth system, the global economy and insurance systems.

Prioritizing Climatic Change Adaptation Investment at Local Government Levels

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC (2007), “Climate change 2007: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability”, Working Group II contribution to the fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK) describes warming of the climate system as “unequivocal”. In future, global warming will influence the frequency and severity of extreme events and in response, local councils around the world must take adaptive measures. In this paper we focus on an investment tool that relates adaptation strategies to climatic extremes for the local government jurisdiction, Ku-ring-gai Council, Australia. The impacts of climatic extremes cannot be solely viewed in terms of economic losses, but should also be considered with regard to their social and environmental implications. Bayesian inference, a method usually used in operational risk analysis is used to assess the economic cost and benefit of adaptation options. The use of this method helps in accounting for the uncertainties and absence of observations for extreme events. Economic modelling is done with selected discount rates considering the economic constraints of local councils. Social and environmental ranks for adaptation options are obtained by drawing ideas from the Delphi approach that elicits expert opinion and tries to obtain consensus in a number of iterative steps. Through this paper we introduce a method to obtain a prioritized set of adaptation options for local scale climate extreme events.