Integrating Global Climate Change Mitigation Goals with Other Sustainability Objectives: A Synthesis

Abstract

Achieving a truly sustainable energy transition requires progress across multiple dimensions beyond climate change mitigation goals. This article reviews and synthesizes results from disparate strands of literature on the coeffects of mitigation to inform climate policy choices at different governance levels. The literature documents many potential cobenefits of mitigation for nonclimate objectives, such as human health and energy security, but little is known about their overall welfare implications. Integrated model studies highlight that climate policies as part of well-designed policy packages reduce the overall cost of achieving multiple sustainability objectives. The incommensurability and uncertainties around the quantification of coeffects become, however, increasingly pervasive the more the perspective shifts from sectoral and local to economy wide and global, the more objectives are analyzed, and the more the results are expressed in economic rather than nonmonetary terms. Different strings of evidence highlight the role and importance of energy demand reductions for realizing synergies across multiple sustainability objectives.

Defining the resilience dividend: accounting for co-benefits of resilience planning

“…As an example, Von Stechow et al (2015)'s definition of co-benefits, as the marginal impact of a policy l on an objective i, can be embedded in a larger model in which a social planner chooses the best set of policies by maximizing social welfare, subject to constraints such as the marginal impact of policy l on objective i being non-negative. Depending on how policies are modeled and objectives defined, this simple optimization problem may reveal what is or is not feasible in the pursuit of enhanced resilience.…”

“…Asset pricing models are the workhorse of macroeconometrics and empirical finance (Campbell 2014). It is possible to imagine an econometric model based on Von Stechow et al (2015)'s definition of marginal welfare with respect to multiple objectives and policies. Economic modeling can provide the foundation for rigorous, data-driven approaches and help articulate testable hypotheses around the resilience dividend.…”

“…Von Stechow, C. et al, 2015. Integrating Global Climate Change Mitigation Goals with Other Sustainability Objectives: A Synthesis.…”

Policy options for a socially balanced climate policy

“…Another important distributional effect is due to non-climate environmental improvements (Von Stechow et al 2015). Climate policy often has co-benefits, such as improved local air quality.…”

Mapping the climate change challenge

“…Similarly, mitigation costs, benefits, and risks cannot be adequately summarized in a single number in an objective way, because, for example, consequences for regional versus local well-being or time preferences vary strongly. Risks of nuclear accidents, food shortages from increased land competition due to bioenergy production, or the loss of an important industry are assessed in the WGIII contribution of the IPCC AR5, but they cannot be summarized in a single number 5,29 . One option for future research is to more fully evaluate and quantify the risks from mitigation, potentially in a summary framework such as "reasons for concern."…”