The ‘boomerang effect’: insights for improved climate action

ABSTRACT

States have been negotiating climate mitigation actions centred around greenhouse gas emissions for several decades. In the wake of the Paris Agreement, a significant body of research has emerged reflecting on the unintended negative consequences of climate mitigation action. More recently, this research includes a focus on climate adaptation actions. The negative impacts have, together, been labelled ‘maladaptation’. Maladaptation as articulated in the literature takes many forms: e.g. displacement of communities from traditional lands such as forests and pasture, violent conflict at different scales, resource capture by elites. In this article, we argue in support of a careful delineation between local-level side effects of climate action and negative effects reaching back to the state (through different pathways and at different levels). The latter we label ‘boomerang effects’. We illustrate, through several examples, the pathways leading from climate action to local impact to boomerang effect, arguing that careful articulation of policy and program decisions, actions and effects upon the state provide support for improved policy making. Climate action is necessary, and necessarily must be better informed in order to achieve the broadest socio-ecological benefits possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• mitigation
• climate change
• boomerang effect
• maladaptation
• climate policy
• NDCs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Larry A. Swatuk holds a PhD from Dalhousie University in Canada. He is a Professor in the School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED) at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is also Extraordinary Professor in the Institute for Water Studies at the University of Western Cape, South Africa and External Researcher at the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), Germany.

Dr. Bejoy K. Thomas has a background in Economics and Development Studies. He is Associate Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, India. His research is problem driven and interdisciplinary, focusing on livelihoods, adaptation and water resources in rural and peri-urban areas.

Lars Wirkus is the Head of Section, Data and GIS and Senior Researcher at the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), Germany. Much of his work focuses on developing data-informed concepts, methods and applications for the assessment, analysis and visualization of the manifestations and dynamics of organized violence at different scales in the context of global environmental and societal change. His academic research interest concerns conflict early warning, natural resources and (violent) conflicts, environmental security, forced migration and climate change.

Dr Florian Krampe is a Senior Researcher in SIPRI's Climate Change and Risk Programme, specializing in peace and conflict research, environmental and climate security, and international security. His current research focuses on climate security and the post-conflict management of natural resources, with a specific interest in the ecological foundations for a socially, economically and politically resilient peace. Dr Krampe is an Affiliated Researcher at the Research School for International Water Cooperation at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University.

Luis Paulo Batista da Silva is an assistant lecturer at the Department of Geography of Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His research focuses on multi-level environmental governance strategies to regulate transboundary river basins within La Plata river basin. He is interested in how state, market, NGOs and civil society engage in cooperative or conflictive actions in order to govern transboundary water resources.

ORCID

Larry A. Swatuk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3066-8090

Bejoy K. Thomas http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5188-0189

Lars Wirkus http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9795-3187

Florian Krampe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2208-794X

Luis Paulo Batista da Silva http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0010-4216

Notes

1 Projects may be scored on a scale of 0–2: 2 (principal) means ‘when the objective (climate change mitigation or adaptation) is explicitly stated as fundamental in the design of, or the motivation for, the activity; 1 (significant) ‘when the objective … is explicitly stated but it is not the fundamental driver or motivation for undertaking it’; or 0, ‘the activity was examined but found not to target the objective … in any significant way’ (OECD DAC, n.d., p. 5). The percentage of the project allowed to be claimed as mitigation and/or adaptation therefore varies from 0% to 100%.

2 For example, ‘in the Cancun Agreements of 2010, the UNFCCC adopted seven non-mandatory safeguards for REDD+ activities into Annex 1.’ Among other things, ‘the safeguards mandate the full and effective participation of relevant stakeholders, in particular indigenous peoples and local communities’ (Raftopoulos & Short, 2019, p. 92).

3 Haldén (2007, p. 107) uses the terms ‘boomerang effect’ and ‘double boomerang effect’, but in an off-hand way: ‘[A] risk generated by an activity which in itself not harmful is a kind of boomerang effect … Once we become aware of risks, or preoccupied with them as in contemporary society, we begin to take measures to alleviate risks. However, attempts to do so may in turn create new risks of their own, a double-boomerang effect, as it were’. The paper goes no further in exploring these ideas. In contrast, we believe the term ‘boomerang effect’ to be an important heuristic device. A boomerang is an aboriginal hunting weapon that when thrown either hits its expected target and is effective, or misses and because of its aerodynamic design returns to the hand of the hunter. In relation to climate policy, a ‘boomerang effect’ denotes not merely the deviation from an expected policy outcome, but a complete policy ‘miss’ which results in the unexpected return of the boomerang to the one who threw it. It is unexpected because the policy makers did not anticipate the possibility of policy failure.

4 See the case studies in Swatuk and Wirkus (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 50656-10083].