Editing IPCC:AR6/WGIII/Chapter-1 (section)

== 1.11 Knowledge Gaps ==

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Despite huge expansion in the literature ( [[#Callaghan--2020|Callaghan et al. 2020]] ), knowledge gaps remain. Modeling still struggles to bring together detailed physical and economic climate impacts and mitigation, with limited representation of financial and distributional dynamics. There are few interdisciplinary tools which apply theories of transition and transformation to questions of economic and social impacts, compounded by remaining uncertainties concerning the role of new technological sets, international instruments, policy and political evaluation.

One scan of future research needs suggests three priority areas ( [[#Roberts--2020|Roberts et al. 2020]] ): (i) human welfare-focused development (e.g., reducing inequality); (ii) how the historic position of states within international power relations conditions their ability to respond to climate change; (iii) transition dynamics and the flexibility of institutions to drive towards low-carbon development pathways. There remain gaps in understanding how international dynamics and agreements filter down to affect constituencies and local implementation. Literature on the potential for supply-side agreements, in which producers agree to restrict the supply of fossil fuels (e.g., [[#Asheim--2019|Asheim et al. 2019]] ) is limited but gaining increasing academic attention.

Nature is under pressure both at land and at sea, as demonstrated by declining biodiversity (IPBES 2019). Climate policies could increase the pressure on land and oceans ( [[#IPCC--2019c|IPCC 2019c]] ,b), with insufficient attention to relationships between biodiversity and climate agreements and associated policies. IPBES aims to coordinate with the IPCC more directly, but literature will be required to support these reports.

Compounding these gaps is the fact that socially oriented, agriculture-related options, where human and non-human systems intersect most obviously, remain under-researched (e.g., [[#Balasubramanya--2020|Balasubramanya and Stifel 2020]] ). Efforts to engage with policies here, especially framed around ecosystem services, have often neglected their ‘practical fitness’ in favour of focusing on their ‘institutional fitness’, which needs to be addressed in future research ( [[#Stevenson--2021|Stevenson et al. 2021]] ).

The relative roles of short-term mitigation policies and long-term investments, including government and financial decision-making tools, remains inadequately explored. Strategic investments may include city planning, public transport, EV-charging networks, and CCU/CCS. Understanding how international treaties can increase incentives to make such investments is all the more salient in the aftermath of COVID-19, on which research is necessarily young but rapidly growing. Finally, the economic, institutional and political strategies to close the gap between NDCs, actual implementation, and mitigation goals – informed by the PA and the UNFCCC Global Stocktake – require much further research.

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