New policy design needed to deal with environmental threat: Study

A recent study suggested that new coherent and collaborative strategies are needed to tackle the greatest global environmental threats.

Rapid climate change and its adverse effect on the environment has been a raging topic worldwide in the recent past. While the report acknowledges that there are no 'simple solutions' to the issue, it does outline these guiding principles to help tackle the growing environmental threat brought by human-made climate change.

These include selecting existing, robust policies to help formulate policy decisions, the need for decisions to be made consistently across regional, national and global boundaries, and a more conclusive look at the true extent that the environment is being impacted.

As part of the study, a team of researchers examined how politicians and legislators can develop a new way to tackle the growing threat of climate change.

Published in the journal of Nature Sustainability, the research comes in response to advice from leading scientists, suggesting that the human impact on the environment is already tipping the world into a new geologically significant era.

In the report, scientists argue that while policies are available, there also needs to be a new way to tackle the geographical, boundary, spatial, ecological and socio-political complexities of the issue; and that will require working together across disciplines.

"The paper shows that the integrated nature of the planetary boundary problems requires an integrated policy response. Traditional policies tend to be highly piecemeal, highly inefficient, prone to failure and can even be counterproductive," said Ian Bateman, co-author of the paper.

Explaining this further, he said, "Such policies take vital resources from key areas while providing short term sticking-plaster efforts for high visibility, often politically motivated causes.