Li Yang, Sewell David K, Saber Saam, Shank Daniel B, Kashima Yoshihisa
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Tin Alley, Parkville, Victoria Australia.
School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Aichi Japan.
Clim Change. 2021;164(1):4. doi: 10.1007/s10584-021-02989-2. Epub 2021 Jan 16.
In the era when human activities can fundamentally alter the planetary climate system, a stable climate is a global commons. However, the need to develop the economy to sustain the growing human population poses the Climate Commons Dilemma. Although citizens may need to support policies that forgo their country's economic growth, they may instead be motivated to grow their economy while freeriding on others' efforts to mitigate the ongoing climate change. To examine how to resolve the climate commons dilemma, we constructed a Climate Commons Game (CCG), an experimental analogue of the climate commons dilemma that embeds a simple model of the effects of economic activities on global temperature rise and its eventual adverse effects on the economy. The game includes multiple economic units, and each participant is tasked to manage one economic unit while keeping global temperature rise to a sustainable level. In two experiments, we show that people can manage the climate system and their economies better when they regarded the goal of environmentally sustainable economic growth as a singular global goal that all economic units collectively pursue rather than a goal to be achieved by each unit individually. In addition, beliefs that everyone shares the knowledge about the climate system help the group coordinate their economic activities better to mitigate global warming in the CCG. However, we also found that the resolution of the climate commons dilemma came at the cost of exacerbating inequality among the economic units in the current constrains of the CCG.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-021-02989-2.
在人类活动能够从根本上改变地球气候系统的时代，稳定的气候是一种全球公共资源。然而，发展经济以维持不断增长的人口需求带来了气候公共资源困境。尽管公民可能需要支持那些放弃本国经济增长的政策，但他们可能反而会被激励去发展本国经济，同时搭便车利用他人缓解当前气候变化的努力。为了研究如何解决气候公共资源困境，我们构建了一个气候公共资源博弈（CCG），这是气候公共资源困境的一个实验模拟，它嵌入了一个关于经济活动对全球气温上升的影响及其最终对经济的不利影响的简单模型。该博弈包括多个经济单元，每个参与者的任务是管理一个经济单元，同时将全球气温上升保持在可持续水平。在两项实验中，我们表明，当人们将环境可持续经济增长的目标视为所有经济单元共同追求的单一全球目标，而不是每个单元各自要实现的目标时，他们能够更好地管理气候系统和自身经济。此外，每个人都共享气候系统知识的信念有助于群体在CCG中更好地协调其经济活动以缓解全球变暖。然而，我们也发现，在CCG当前的限制条件下，气候公共资源困境的解决是以加剧经济单元之间的不平等为代价的。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s10584-021-02989-2获取的补充材料。
