Self-adaptive Multi-objective Climate Policies Align Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies

Intensifying climate change impacts can divert the economic resources away from emission reduction toward adaptation to reduce rising damages, jeopardizing temperature stabilization within safe levels. Indeed, the traditional static welfare-maximizing climate policy design leads to a conflict between mitigation and adaptation, invalidating the recently established consistency of cost-benefit analysis with the Paris Agreement’s targets. Here, we show that this tension can be resolved by integrating multi-objective optimization and feedback control in the Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy model to design self-adaptive climate policies trading off welfare maximization with the Paris Agreement compliance. These policies allow adjusting against uncertainty as information on the socio-climatic system accumulates, thus representing the policy-making process more realistically. We show that, the costs being the same as in traditional methods, warming above 2°C and the probability of overshooting can be drastically reduced, emphasizing the need for integrating adaptation and mitigation strategies and the value of embracing a self-adaptive, multi-objective perspective.