Envisioning climate cooperatives: equitable and just ocean futures

Keywords: Climate Change, Novel social-environmental systems, Ocean equity
Session Type: Virtual Poster Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 49

Abstract

Surviving climate change will depend on whether we can cooperate with one another or not. With the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) recently completed, there is a growing acceptance that a certain level of climate warming is unavoidable. To survive in this century and beyond, we argue that climate science needs to transition from identifying “milestones to catastrophe” in the climate marathon, to an understanding of how increasing global temperatures will change the relationships between people/nations through space and time. Climate change is projected to produce novel local environments – previously unseen environmental conditions. However, future novel environments in one location could have analogous conditions in another location today. We argue that this connects people across space and time.

We present results from a new state-of-the-art approach to quantifying the emergence of novel environmental conditions, focusing on marine environments, and demonstrate how this connects people/nations through space and time. We present this as a new solution to improving our ability to adapt and transform to changing conditions: climate cooperatives. Climate cooperatives are sets of nations that share similar environments separated by time. We argue that it is imperative that nations proactively seek to strengthen ties with other nations in their climate cooperative. Through this solution, we elevate indigenous ecological knowledge and the non-linear conceptualization of time that is absent from Western cultures, as an appropriate epistemology that 21st climate science and policy can support.