Addressing The Risks Of Climate Change

Abstract

This article describes the urgency to address climate change risks. One message is that the focus on mitigation and adaptation alone will not allow to reduce climate change risks with the time left before we reach potential tipping points of the climate system. The article therefore has a focus on additional approaches such as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) by technologies that can be upscaled to limit overshooting to a reasonable period of time (several decades) and approaches to avoid further warming by use of solar radiative management (SRM) approaches to buy time before CDR will have done its job. As a first step with respect to governance, principles that could be the basis for requirements are suggested, based upon recently developed documents in the private and voluntary domain to address greenwashing in the context of carbon neutrality/net zero carbon claims.