Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity; its effects are already influencing food, water, health, political and economic security worldwide [125]. Scientists and activists have been raising concerns about climate change for over three decades (e.g. [84, 167]), and public policy responses throughout that time have varied considerably. When the Conference of the Parties (COP 22) took place in Marrakech in 2016, there were “854 climate change laws and policies, rising from only 54 laws and policies in 1997, and 426 in 2009 when the Copenhagen Accord was signed” [86]. With such a large quantity of laws and policies, it is no surprise that many cities, national governments, and intergovernmental organisations have designed unique policy programs and legal frameworks to address climate change [94, 125, 221, 230, 265].
At the international scale, the United Nations has had a longstanding commitment to addressing the effects of climate change [265]. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was initiated in 1992 and led to the creation and adoption of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which legally required its signatories to meet certain emission reduction targets. [94, 265]. This was more recently replaced by the 2015 Paris Agreement, which was adopted in December 2015. According to the UNFCCC’s website,
“The Paris Agreement seeks to accelerate and intensify the actions and invest- ment needed for a sustainable low carbon future. Its central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global tempera- ture rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Agreement also aims to strengthen the ability of countries to deal with the impacts of climate change.” [265]
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Although the United Nations does not have any specific policies to help its member states meet these targets, it does support its members in designing climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies [265]. More importantly, its various agreements and strategies have influenced regional policy development related to climate change. For example, in the European Union, “the EU climate and energy package was adopted in 2009 to imple- ment the 20-20-20 targets endorsed by EU leaders in 2007: by 2020 there should be a 20% reduction of GHG emissions compared with 1990, a 20% share of renewables in EU energy consumption, and energy improvement by 20%” [65]. These 20-20-20 targets were directly influenced by the Kyoto Protocol agreements, and have been supported through the design and development of EU-level policies related to energy consumption, renewable energy development, automobile design, manufacturing industry requirements, and landfill management [65, 135, 278].
At the domestic scale in Europe, the 20-20-20 targets were implemented using a variety of policies to meet a variety of country-specific emissions reductions targets [135, 221]. For example, in the United Kingdom, a centre-left government passed the 2008 Climate Change Act, which included a series of sector-specfic policies related to decarbonising the economy [161, 221]. Meanwhile, Austria’s government relied on a combination of “high incentives and subsidies; moderate education and outreach, financial and regulatory instruments, and framework policies; and low public investments, tradeable permits, and voluntary agreements” [221]. Nearly every national government in the EU adopted their own unique policy program to address climate change and, due to the global scale of climate change, those national policies affected city-level policies [147]. Public policy responses at the domestic scale elsewhere in the world varied considerably, too. New Zealand, Canada, the United States of America, South Korea, China, and dozens of other countries have set national greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets [78, 94, 126, 221].
Reducing CO2emissions is by no means the only issue championed by climate change
policies. Sector-specific policies related to deforestation, water and land management, agriculture, and mining also exist at the domestic and international scales [123, 124, 126]. Many of these policies attempt to help economies and people mitigate or adapt to the ecosystem-level effects of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces a series of detailed, peer-reviewed reports that offer an overview of existing, as well as future, adaptation and mitigation needs and strategies (e.g. [123, 124, 126]). For example, in their recent report on Africa, they explain that “legislative and policy frameworks for adaptation [in Africa] remain fragmented, adaptation policy approaches seldom take into account realities in the political and institutional spheres, and national policies are often at
92 Environmental Public Policies and HCI
odds with autonomous local adaptation strategies, which can act as a barrier to adaptation, especially where cultural, traditional, and context-specific factors are ignored” [123].
Climate change policy informing HCI
Climate change policies have become widespread and almost certainly should inform HCI research in some capacity of another, if they haven’t already. Every region, country, city, and scale that HCI research is conducted in will be influenced by some form of climate change policy. Although no documentation explicitly states that climate change policy has directly influenced the HCI community, the emergence of the sustainable HCI community runs in tandem with the growth in climate change policy adoption worldwide. Some HCI research projects focused on behaviour change technologies, energy and data demand, and sustainable social practices also appear to align with climate change policy goals (e.g. [29, 71, 101, 140, 201, 203]). However, no clear evidence suggests that work undertaken by HCI researchers and practitioners is a direct response to any governmental or intergovernmental climate change policies, projects, targets or goals.
HCI informing climate change policy
Again, there is no evidence to suggest that the HCI community has attempted to influence—or has successfully influenced—climate change policies. However, the HCI community has produced a considerable body of work exploring how social practices and digital technologies affect energy consumption in the home and workplace, as well as through distributed digital service design [14, 99, 101, 204]. The HCI community has also learned many lessons from persuasive technology projects [29, 71, 140, 201, 203]. These findings appear to have gone largely unnoticed by environmental public policymakers, whose efforts remain focused on behavioural change technologies [230], especially related to energy consumption (e.g. [47]). This focus opens a series of opportunities for the HCI community to share their expertise with policymakers, and possibly influence climate change policies. Moreover, the HCI community could engage with the design and development of spatial planning software packages, which help policymakers think about and design climate change adaptation and mitigation projects [147].