Rethinking and reshaping the climate policy: Literature review and proposed guidelines

Addressing climate change represents a governing the climate commons on a global scale. The “tragedy of the commons” might better be described as the “failure of governing the commons”. Hardin’s solutions were “centralized government” and “private property”, which have long been criticized as oversimplified. However, governing the unprecedented climate commons, there is only a “global federalism of climate policy”—the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto cannot keep atmospheric CO2 level below 450 ppm (rising 2 °C). Some key evidences of the Kyoto failures are identified. The Kyoto failures do not indicate that the Kyoto is a wrong tool of “centralized government”. Instead, the Kyoto failures are derived from the fact that the only “centralized government” cannot effectively govern the commons, which have been proven by the efforts of governing the commons last four decades. Here we propose a wide diversity of governance systems for climate common to addressing global warming. The multi-level and multi-scale governing system includes but is not limited to: (i) starting at home, (ii) emphasizing the local approach, (iii) efforts of global-level focusing these top emitters, (iv) improved information sharing, (v) privatizing the property of climate to avoid “free riders”, (vi) combination mitigation with adaptive, (vii) improved ecology services to expand carbon sinks. We argue that the Kyoto failures indicate again that reliance on a single “solution” may result in more of a problem than a solution in governing the common. Therefore, continuing to wait for another global federalism of climate policy may lead to missing the chance to make significant mitigations and adaptations in time to battling the climate change. Post-2012, multi-level and multi-scale approaches could make a difference in collective action for governing the climate commons to meet climate challenge.