Climate change governance, cooperation and self-organization

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We introduce a simple approach to address dilemmas in which the risk of failure plays a central role in individual decisions. This model can be shown to capture some of the essential features discovered in recent key experiments, while allowing one to extend in non-trivial ways the experimental conditions to regions of more practical interest. Our results suggest that global coordination for a common good should be attempted by segmenting tasks in many small to medium sized groups, in which perception of risk is high and uncertainty in collective goals is minimized. Moreover, our results support the conclusion that sanctioning institutions may further enhance the chances of coordinating to tame the planet's climate, as long as they are implemented in a decentralized and polycentric manner."

Recommended citation: Jorge M Pacheco, Vítor V Vasconcelos, and Francisco C Santos. “Climate change governance, cooperation and self-organization” Phys. Life Rev. (2015) 11 4 573-586