The climate commons dilemma: how can humanity solve the commons dilemma for the global climate commons?

Abstract

In the era when human activities can fundamentally alter the planetary climate system, a stable climate is a global commons. However, the need to develop the economy to sustain the growing human population poses the Climate Commons Dilemma. Although citizens may need to support policies that forgo their country’s economic growth, they may instead be motivated to grow their economy while freeriding on others’ efforts to mitigate the ongoing climate change. To examine how to resolve the climate commons dilemma, we constructed a Climate Commons Game (CCG), an experimental analogue of the climate commons dilemma that embeds a simple model of the effects of economic activities on global temperatu..