Rebound effects, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, tourism

Abstract: An increasing number of studies advocate the need to handle the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change in context and not separately. This relates to both research and policymaking. If treated separately there is an obvious danger that adaptation policies may trigger increases in GHG emissions (maladaptation) and mitigating policies can trigger increases in societal vulnerability to climate change (malmitigation), and furthermore that climate change mitigation and adaptation research may enforce this unfortunate situation. In this paper I will investigate the potential of applying theories on rebound effects to shed light on the consequences of not uniting mitigation and adaptation. I will use the current climate policy discourse from the tourism sector in Norway as a concrete illustration of these relationships and the potential of applying rebound theory on the climate change discourse.

This media entry was a contribution to the special session "Rebound Effect I: Energy, efficiency, and growth" at the 4th International Degrowth Conference in Leipzig in 2014.