Measuring the Co-Benefits of Climate Change Mitigation

Abstract:The main objective of this article is to assess the priorities of local governments (LGs) in Europe regarding climate change mitigation technologies evaluation in the electricity sector and to provide important insights for energy policy design. The study applies a hybrid weighting methodology to elicit LGs' preferences in a constructive and iterative way regarding the evaluation criteria of low-carbon energy technologies. Furthermore, the study employs three data collection and preference elicitation methods, namely: survey, workshop, and webinar. The study was conducted across thirty one (31) European LGs that were categorized according to three variables: population size, geographical region and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. The analysis shows that "CO2 emissions" is the most important criterion among European LGs, followed by "mortality and morbidity" and "ecosystem damages". The results illustrate the potential synergies of climate and energy policies for addressing both CO2 emissions and air pollution. It was also found, based on a correlation analysis, that LGs with higher GDP per capita tend to provide higher weights to criteria related to security of energy supply and technological innovation. The current study provides insights on the actual LGs' priorities that are important to consider during low-carbon energy technologies evaluation and energy policy design. Interestingly, the results of the European LGs' preferences clearly show that the EU climate policy objectives have reached OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2015, 8 11642 different levels of governance-and at this particular case, the local level. Furthermore, the developed methodology could be applied at different geographical regions to map other regions' LG priorities, but also at a group decision making context to elicit relevant stakeholders' preferences regarding low-carbon energy technologies and policy objectives.

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“…Twenty (20) LGs responded out of 100 that were contacted (20% response rate) and one of these was a representative of a LGs' association.…”

Section: Data Collection Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping and Measuring European Local Governments’ Priorities for a Sustainable and Low-Carbon Energy Future

et al. 2015

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“…The Indian group produced publications through their involvement in the IPCC (Ürge-Vorsatz, Herrero, Dubash, & Lecocq, 2014) and the attempts to influence the domestic climate policy process (Dubash, Khosla, Rao, & Sharma, 2015;Dubash, Raghunandan, Sant, & Sreenivas, 2013). The South African group also shared connection to the IPCC, but offered systematized explicit knowledge on co-benefits in the collaboration with the Latin American teams (e.g.…”

Section: 14mentioning

confidence: 99%

Novel shapes of South–South collaboration: emerging knowledge networks on co-benefits of climate and development policies

Rennkamp

Boulle

2017

Climate and Development

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This paper analyses knowledge networks on co-benefits of climate and development. The world's most sizeable populations live in middle-income countries with emerging economies and growing emissions. This situation requires political intervention to facilitate economic growth, job creation and poverty eradication alongside efforts to control emissions growth. This interdisciplinary study draws on concepts and methods from sociology, political science, science and technology studies and the management literature. The authors combine social network and discourse network analysis in an innovative way. The methodology analyses both the interactions between researchers as well as their actual knowledge contributions. The study argues that there is a substantial network of knowledge holders involved in knowledge creation on climate and development co-benefits. Our analysis shows the type of interactions between two knowledge networks as well as new knowledge emerging from these networks. Research groups and practitioners have produced 17 novel knowledge contributions, ranging from definitions of co-benefits, methodology and implementation. Yet the networks remain loosely connected. Practitioners who have less time to assess academic literature could benefit from closer interactions with more academically oriented experts and vice versa.

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“…This more complementary understanding of the relationship between climate, growth and development is gradually filtering into academic scholarship in the disciplines of economics [18,30,31], international relations [32], game theory [33,34] and climate ethics [10,11,35,36], among others. It has also influenced policy-oriented work, most explicitly in the work of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate [21] and its associated country studies, but also in multilateral economic institutions [37][38][39][40][41], and it has begun to influence policy and practice in some developing countries [42 -44] and developed countries [45].…”

Section: The Relationship Between Development Climate and Cooperatiomentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic development, climate and values: making policy

Stern¹

2015

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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The two defining challenges of this century are overcoming poverty and managing the risks of climate change. Over the past 10 years, we have learned much about how to tackle them together from ideas on economic development and public policy. My own work in these areas over four decades as an academic and as a policy adviser in universities and international financial institutions has focused on how the investment environment and the empowerment of people can change lives and livelihoods. The application of insights from economic development and public policy to climate change requires rigorous analysis of issues such as discounting, modelling the risks of unmanaged climate change, climate policy targets and estimates of the costs of mitigation. The latest research and results show that the case for avoiding the risks of dangerous climate change through the transition to low-carbon economic development and growth is still stronger than when the Stern Review was published. This is partly because of evidence that some of the impacts of climate change are happening more quickly than originally expected, and because of remarkable advances in technologies, such as solar power. Nevertheless, significant hurdles remain in securing the international cooperation required to avoid dangerous climate change, not least because of disagreements and misunderstandings about key issues, such as ethics and equity.

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Measuring the Co-Benefits of Climate Change Mitigation

Cited by 200 publications

References 114 publications

Mapping and Measuring European Local Governments’ Priorities for a Sustainable and Low-Carbon Energy Future

Mapping and Measuring European Local Governments’ Priorities for a Sustainable and Low-Carbon Energy Future

Novel shapes of South–South collaboration: emerging knowledge networks on co-benefits of climate and development policies

Economic development, climate and values: making policy

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