From Universities to Farming and Beyond: Institutional Carbon Management as a New Tool serving Mitigation and Adaptation
Abstract
The challenge of contributing to the Paris Agreement climate goals of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees C, with efforts to reach 1.5 degrees, is profound not only for international policy and whole countries worldwide but also at the sub-country institutional levels of organizations and companies as well as down to household and individual person levels. Together achieving the needed sustainable transformation to a low carbon and climate-friendly society, activity, and lifestyle in a fair and effective manner at all these public, institutional, and personal levels requires a professional solution-oriented approach to successfully implement one's own portion of an overall successful climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Here we introduce in this context the new concept and key tools of public, institutional, and personal carbon management (PCM, ICM, and pCM), with focus on the Institutional Carbon Management (ICM) targeted to support organizations and enterprises of any size between whole countries, states and municipalities and single households, families and persons. ICM is designed to help institutions estimate a reliable reference-year carbon budget and to pursue a successful low carbon transition in a sustainable way by adopting a decadal target budget and corresponding carbon reduction path and engaging the relevant intra-institutional actors in the needed action areas for achieving energy, mobility, resources, and stocks changes that lead to meet the target budget. Both the intra-institutional actors structure and the action areas structure (action fields, subfields, emission groups) are relevant as is a dynamical decision support workflow using actors-based modeling. For instructive illustration of the concept and tools in practice, the University of Graz as a higher education & research organization and a mid-sized Farm as an agriculture & forest management enterprise are discussed as concrete examples of ICM implementation. We find that ICM (and similarly PCM and pCM) thanks to its systematic approach has high and novel potential to actively overcome the complex barriers against successful low carbon transition, including towards sustainable agriculture and forestry that is critical to achieve the needed transformative climate change mitigation and adaptation.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMH058.0007K
- Keywords:
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- 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1865 Soils;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1899 General or miscellaneous;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 4329 Sustainable development;
- NATURAL HAZARDS