Determinants of successful mitigation in coupled social-climate dynamics

TL;DR

This paper models the interaction between human mitigation behavior and forest health using coupled systems and evolutionary game theory, revealing key factors influencing successful climate mitigation over a century.

Contribution

It introduces a novel coupled model integrating human behavior and forest dynamics with time delays, providing new insights into social-climate feedback mechanisms.

Findings

Forest survival depends on mitigation levels and timing.

Oscillations in mitigation behavior can occur over time.

Rare cases of forest survival without mitigation were identified.

Abstract

Understanding the impact of human behavior is crucial for successful mitigation of climate change across the globe. To shed light onto this issue, here we couple the forest dieback model with human behaviors. Using evolutionary game theory, we build a time-delay system where forest growth is impacted by both temperature and human mitigation choices, the latter being informed by temperature forecasts. Simulations of the coupled system over 200 years show us the varying outcomes: forest dies out and no one is a mitigator, forest dies out and everyone is a mitigator, or the forest survives and everyone is a mitigator. There exist rare cases where no one is a mitigator and yet the forest survives, but with a low coverage. We also find occasional oscillations where the proportion of mitigators vary between 0 and 1. Our results are based on simple models but have profound insights into determinants of behavior changes desired in social-climate dynamics.