Dear Michel,

Greetings from down under! For your information I am sending you my article "A Realistic (Holistic) Approach to Climate Mitigation". I hope you and your colleagues find it interesting and useful!

Here is the abstract:

At this time, most climate researchers are only using a limited range of futures approaches:
for example, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) future scenarios have been
developed primarily with empirical predictive methods that extrapolate trends. These seriously
underestimate the risk of nonlinear developments and critical failures. This article examines
the Paris Climate Conference (COP) 21 agreement on climate mitigation; explains why
current efforts are based on false assumptions and likely to fail; argues that holistic, integrative
methods are needed to avoid disaster; and uses these methods to develop a practical strategy
for accelerating systemic transformation. Despite the impressive diplomatic achievements of
the Paris Agreement, there is a dangerous lag between the pace of political, economic, and
technological change and the rapid (non-negotiable) rate of climate change. The challenge is
to find ways to manage the conflict between the need to work within existing institutional
frameworks and the reality that they are not (and may be structurally incapable of) acting
quickly enough to prevent catastrophic outcomes. This dichotomy may be resolved by using a
three-track strategy: the first track will focus on accelerating existing climate mitigation efforts
by encouraging decision-makers to use holistic, critical-safety risk management methods. The
second track will counter ideological opposition with constructive alternative narratives. The
third track will help catalyze the global movement needed to empower structural transformation
and the emergence of a sustainable global system. It will not be possible to resolve many complex
global socioecological problems (climate, water, food, energy, growing inequality, etc.) without
transformational change. Integrative, whole-systems methods are now needed to accelerate the
evolution of a sustainable global system.

The full article is available on-line at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1946756716673640

Warm regards,

Graeme

Graeme Taylor, PhD

Co-ordinator, BEST Futures (www.bestfutures.org)
Adjunct Research Fellow, Environmental Futures Research Institute, Griffith University
(61)738710642