One Size Fits All Not the Way to Go on Global Warming
Nicolas Loris /
In an interview last year, Dr. Elinor Ostrom the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the first woman to receive prize in economics, offers some tremendous insight. She stresses adaptation over a one-size-fits-all approach and says she doesn’t “think it’s possible just to have a nice little neat optimal plan.” With the climate change conference in Copenhagen coming in December, Elinor Ostrom’s point about international agreements is especially relevant:
Recognizing that this is something that must be done at multiple levels, so what I am concerned about is a lot of people think that the only way to cope with global change is international agreements. And if we sit around and wait for the national leaders of our respective countries to come to an agreement and operationalize it and make it effective, then people along the coast are going to lose their coasts. So, we must be thinking of diverse ways that we can increase the capacity to respond to external change. We can just call it capacity to respond to change.