Enabling new mindsets and transformative skills for negotiating and activating climate action: Lessons from UNFCCC conferences of the parties.

Technological and policy solutions for transitioning to a fossil-free society exist, many countries could afford the transition, and rational arguments for rapid climate action abound. Yet effective action is still lacking. Dominant policy approaches have failed to generate action at anywhere near the rate, scale or depth needed to avoid potentially catastrophic futures. This is despite 30 years of climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and wide-ranging actions at national, transnational and sub-national levels. Practitioners and scholars are, thus, increasingly arguing that also the root causes of the problem must be addressed - the mindset (or paradigm) out of which the climate emergency has arisen. Against this background, we investigate decision-makers' views of the need for a different mindset and inner qualities that can support negotiating and activating climate action, along with factors that could enable such a mindset shift. Data were collected during participatory workshops run at the 25th UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP25) in 2019, and comprise surveys, as well as social media communication and semi-structured interviews with COP attendees. Our results underline vast agreement among participants regarding the need for a mindset shift that can support new ways of communication and collaboration, based on more relational modes of knowing, being and acting. They also suggest the emergence of such a mindset shift across sectors and contexts, but not yet at the collective and systems levels. Finally, they highlight the importance of transformative skills and the need for experimental, safe spaces. The latter are seen as a visible manifestation and enabler that can support agency for change through shared self-reflection, experience and practice. We present a transformative skills framework, and conclude with further research needs and policy recommendations.

City-level climate change mitigation in China.

As national efforts to reduce CO2 emissions intensify, policy-makers need increasingly specific, subnational information about the sources of CO2 and the potential reductions and economic implications of different possible policies. This is particularly true in China, a large and economically diverse country that has rapidly industrialized and urbanized and that has pledged under the Paris Agreement that its emissions will peak by 2030. We present new, city-level estimates of CO2 emissions for 182 Chinese cities, decomposed into 17 different fossil fuels, 46 socioeconomic sectors, and 7 industrial processes. We find that more affluent cities have systematically lower emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP), supported by imports from less affluent, industrial cities located nearby. In turn, clusters of industrial cities are supported by nearby centers of coal or oil extraction. Whereas policies directly targeting manufacturing and electric power infrastructure would drastically undermine the GDP of industrial cities, consumption-based policies might allow emission reductions to be subsidized by those with greater ability to pay. In particular, sector-based analysis of each city suggests that technological improvements could be a practical and effective means of reducing emissions while maintaining growth and the current economic structure and energy system. We explore city-level emission reductions under three scenarios of technological progress to show that substantial reductions (up to 31%) are possible by updating a disproportionately small fraction of existing infrastructure.

Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications.

The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change commits signatories to preventing 'dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system', leaving unspecified the level of global warming that is dangerous. In the late 1990s, a limit of 2°C global warming above preindustrial temperature was proposed as a 'guard rail' below which most of the dangerous climate impacts could be avoided. The 2009 Copenhagen Accord recognized the scientific view 'that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius' despite growing views that this might be too high. At the same time, the continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions in the past decade and the delays in a comprehensive global emissions reduction agreement have made achieving this target extremely difficult, arguably impossible, raising the likelihood of global temperature rises of 3°C or 4°C within this century. Yet, there are few studies that assess the potential impacts and consequences of a warming of 4°C or greater in a systematic manner. Papers in this themed issue provide an initial picture of the challenges facing a world that warms by 4°C or more, and the difficulties ahead if warming is to be limited to 2°C with any reasonable certainty. Across many sectors--coastal cities, agriculture, water stress, ecosystems, migration--the impacts and adaptation challenges at 4°C will be larger than at 2°C. In some cases, such as farming in sub-Saharan Africa, a +4°C warming could result in the collapse of systems or require transformational adaptation out of systems, as we understand them today. The potential severity of impacts and the behavioural, institutional, societal and economic challenges involved in coping with these impacts argue for renewed efforts to reduce emissions, using all available mechanisms, to minimize the chances of high-end climate change. Yet at the same time, there is a need for accelerated and focused research that improves understanding of how the climate system might behave under a +4°C warming, what the impacts of such changes might be and how best to adapt to what would be unprecedented changes in the world we live in.

Interoceptive awareness mediates the relationship between anxiety and the intensity of unpleasant feelings.

This study examined the relationship between interoceptive awareness, anxiety, and the intensity of unpleasant feelings. The perception of visceral signals (interoceptive awareness) plays an important role in the pathophysiology of anxiety disorders. Nevertheless, studies simultaneously investigating relationships between emotion processing, anxiety, and interoceptive awareness remain sparse. The present study was designed to elucidate the interrelations between these variables. Trait anxiety and interoceptive awareness were assessed in 102 healthy participants. Following this, neutral and unpleasant pictures were presented and subjects were asked to rate perceived emotional pleasantness and arousal. We found that both interoceptive awareness and trait anxiety were significantly positively correlated with mean arousal scores for unpleasant pictures. A positive relationship between interoceptive awareness and trait anxiety was also found. Subsequent regression analyses showed that the relationship between emotional arousal and trait anxiety was mediated by differences in interoceptive awareness. Our results highlight the possible role of interoceptive awareness in the development of trait anxiety and may have further implications for theoretical models of anxiety disorders and their treatment.