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IB DP ESS — Topic 6: Atmosphere and Climate Change | SL & HL | Paper 1 & Paper 2
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define climate change mitigation and distinguish it from climate change adaptation using IB-aligned ESS terminology.
- Explain how renewable energy technologies, carbon capture, and energy efficiency measures reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions within the climate system.
- Describe the role of international agreements — including the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto Protocol — in coordinating global mitigation efforts.
- Analyse the effectiveness of specific mitigation strategies using ESS analysis parameters: scale, sustainability, trade-offs, and multiple perspectives.
- Evaluate the strengths and limitations of technological, political, and behavioural approaches to climate change mitigation.
- Discuss contrasting worldviews — ecocentric, technocentric, and anthropocentric — in relation to climate change mitigation priorities and strategies.
- Justify why mitigation must be understood as a systems-level intervention, addressing feedback loops and tipping points within the climate system.
Real-World Context & Relevance
In August 2021, the IPCC released its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), delivering what UN Secretary-General António Guterres called "a code red for humanity." The report confirmed that global average surface temperatures had already risen approximately 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, driven overwhelmingly by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. More critically, AR6 projected that without immediate and deep reductions in emissions, the world would breach the 1.5°C threshold — the more ambitious target of the 2015 Paris Agreement — within the next decade. The window for effective mitigation was narrowing rapidly.
Yet the same report also showed something important: the trajectory is not fixed. Scenarios in which global emissions are halved by 2030 and reach net-zero by mid-century could still limit warming to 1.5°C, avoiding the most catastrophic tipping points — including the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the dieback of the Amazon rainforest. This is the core logic of climate change mitigation: intervening in the climate system now to reduce the magnitude of future change. The question is not whether mitigation is possible, but whether the political, economic, and social systems of human societies can mobilise quickly enough to achieve it.
🌍 Why This Matters Climate change mitigation directly determines the future stability of Earth's climate system and the ecosystems and human societies embedded within it. Every fraction of a degree of warming avoided translates into reduced frequency of extreme weather events, slower sea-level rise, and preserved biodiversity. Mitigation is not an abstract policy exercise — it is a systems-level intervention in the most consequential environmental challenge of the 21st century.
Core Concepts & Definitions
Before exploring specific strategies, it is essential to understand what mitigation actually means in the context of the climate system. The climate system is driven by the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation. When greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, they trap outgoing radiation, raising global temperatures. Mitigation addresses this imbalance at its source — by reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, either by cutting emissions or by removing gases already present.
📖 Key Definition — Climate Change Mitigation Climate change mitigation refers to human interventions that reduce the sources of greenhouse gas emissions or enhance the sinks that absorb them, with the aim of limiting the magnitude and rate of future climate change. Mitigation targets the causes of climate change, in contrast to