ABSTRACT
Taking a precautionary approach to climate policy is in one way simple – try to prevent climate catastrophes! – and yet it is also very complex. The Catastrophic Precautionary Principle is a useful guide to climate policy because it gives us a clear benchmark for identifying unacceptable climate risks: precautionary climate policy should minimally aim to prevent climate catastrophes now and into the future. This chapter explores how the Catastrophic Precautionary Principle may be incorporated into global climate policy to help ground aggressive climate policy on all fronts (mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering). The Catastrophic Precautionary Decision-Making Framework can serve as our guide to determining an appropriate precautionary strategy against climate catastrophe(s). It can help us identify both the strongly action-guiding recommendations that follow from the Catastrophic Precautionary Principle for climate policy and the places where other considerations will have to come into play before we can determine how to implement the precautionary measures recommended by this approach.
