The optimal paths of climate change mitigation and adaptation under certainty and uncertainty

Felgenhauer, Tyler; Bruin, Kelly C. de

doi:10.1504/ijgw.2009.027082

Cited by 24 publications

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“…In theory the mitigation ‘control knob’ problem ought to be sensitive to uncertainties concerning the costs and benefits of adaptation . To the extent that the net costs of adaptation are lower, the optimal and anticipated level of adaptation will be greater, the residual climate impacts less, and the optimal degree of climate mitigation less of a departure from a business‐as‐usual scenario . But this theory is no longer considered particularly useful.…”

Section: Uncertainties That Matter For Climate Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The IPCC has commissioned three iterations of guidance notes to identify the issues associated with uncertainty communication. [2][3][4] Countless articles have highlighted the importance of uncertainty in climate policy debates, [5][6][7] suggesting important aspects of climate uncertainty that need to be communicated 8,9 and how to best communicate them. [9][10][11] For those concerned that public skepticism concerning the existence of climate change may contribute to a lack of effective climate policy, the last few years have not been encouraging.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Perceptions and communication strategies for the many uncertainties relevant for climate policy

Patt

Weber²

2013

WIREs Climate Change

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Public opinion polls reveal that the perception of climate change as an uncertain phenomenon is increasing, even as consensus has increased within the scientific community of its reality and its attribution to human causes. At the same time, the scientific community has sought to improve its communication practices, in order to present a more accurate picture to the public and policy makers of the state of scientific knowledge about climate change. In this review article, we examine two sets of insights that could influence the success of such communication efforts. The first set questions which uncertainties matter for effective climate policy. While the literature has focused disproportionately on uncertainties with respect to the climate system, we draw attention here to uncertainties associated with the solution space. The second set examines which factors lead people to take slow and deliberated decisions versus quick and spontaneous ones, and looks at the results of these two systems of thought on climate change action. From the review of these two sets of literature, we propose a new hypothesis: that the gap between public and scientific attitudes toward climate change will narrow not because of greater attention to and communication of climate system risks and uncertainties, but rather out of growing experience with the policies and technological systems needed to address the problem. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. How to cite this article:WIREs Clim Change 2014Change , 5:219-232. doi: 10.1002 INTRODUCTION: THE GROWING GAP BETWEEN CLIMATE SCIENCE AND CLIMATE PERCEPTION In 1989, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was preparing its first assessment report, and as national delegates were gearing up for the process of negotiating the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the world's largest oil company, Exxon, * Correspondence to: anthony.patt@usys.ethz.ch was also hard at work. Together with several other oil companies, they formed the Global Climate Coalition, an advocacy group opposed to policies that would limit the burning of fossil fuels. Their main approach, according to a report on their activities written by the Union of Concerned Scientists, was to 'manufacture uncertainty' on the science of climate change and people's role in it.1 A 1998 memo made clear that their objective would be achieved 'when average citizens [recognize] uncertainties in climate science,' and hence their strategy was to 'develop and implement a national media relations program to inform the media about uncertainties in climate science' 1 (p. 10). In the seven years following, the company pumped $16 million into this information campaign. 219 Advanced Reviewwires.wiley.com/climatechange that any perception by the public that there is uncertainty in the science behind climate change and its attribution to human actions has been and will continue to be the death knell for effective policy-making to combat it. At the same time, the climate change research and policy community has l...

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Section: Uncertainties That Matter For Climate Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Perceptions and communication strategies for the many uncertainties relevant for climate policy

Patt

Weber²

2013

WIREs Climate Change

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“…Zehaie (2009), Buob and Stephan (2011) and Heuson et al (forthcoming) study the strategic implications of adaptation in noncooperative settings. Kane and Shogren (2000), Felgenhauer andde Bruin (2009), Ingham et al (2007), Auerswald et al (2011) andZemel (2015) explore the interactions between mitigation and adaptation under uncertainty. In Bréchet et al (2013), optimal mitigation and adaptation investments are studied on a macroeconomic level.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Bréchet et al (2013), optimal mitigation and adaptation investments are studied on a macroeconomic level. Analyses of the optimal policy mix in the context of integrated assessment climate-economy models include Tol (2007), Bosello et al (2010, Agrawala et al (2011) and Felgenhauer andWebster (2013, 2014). Barrage (2015) acknowledges that distortionary fiscal policy affects the trade-off between mitigation and adaptation in a second-best setting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The political economy of mitigation and adaptation

Habla

Roeder

2017

European Economic Review

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In this paper, we acknowledge that the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change have differential fiscal impacts. Whereas mitigation typically raises fiscal revenues, adaptation is costly to the taxpayer and to a greater extent the more distortionary the tax system is. In an OLG model with majority voting, we analyze how the choices of mitigation and adaptation are distorted under a lump-sum and a distortionary income tax regime. We find that whenever emissions and adaptation exhibit stock characteristics, the levels of mitigation and adaptation are chosen inefficiently low in the political equilibrium under lump-sum taxation. By contrast, the political equilibrium may entail inefficiently high mitigation or inefficiently high adaptation (but not both simultaneously) if the tax system is distortionary.A calibration of our model to the German economy shows that both mitigation and adaptation can be expected to be inefficiently low in the political equilibrium. Furthermore, the standard assumption of a lump-sum tax system when analyzing mitigation and adaptation is found to underestimate the loss in utilitarian welfare relative to a distortionary tax system, although mitigation levels are generally higher under the latter regime. JEL-Classification: D72, D78, H21, H23, Q58Keywords: Adaptation, Mitigation, Political Economy, Majority Voting, OLG, Environmental Taxes * We thank Kelly de Bruin, Jurate Jaraite-Kazukauski, Thomas Sterner and seminar participants at the University of Umeå for valuable comments and suggestions. Wolfgang Habla acknowledges the generous financial support from the FORMAS research program COMMONS.

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“…A further methodology consists of specifying stochastic damage functions in IA models and then verifying which abatement prescriptions are consistent with different preferences and risk management criteria (Kunreuter et al, 2013;Drouet et al, 2015) The bulk of this literature, however, focuses on mitigation choices, while little has been done on adaptation (partial exceptions are Felgenhauer andde Bruin 2009, Bosello et al, 2014). Furthermore, these approaches tend to consider a "specific" risk and to implement not easily generalizable ad hoc methodologies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Uncertainty into the Adaptation Cost Estimation in Integrated Assessment Models

et al. 2016

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This paper proposes an operationally simple and easily generalizable methodology to incorporate climate change damage uncertainty into Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). Uncertainty is transformed into a risk-premium, damage-correction, region-specific factor by extracting damage distribution means and variances from an ensemble of socio economic and climate change scenarios. This risk premium quantifies what society would be willing to pay to insure against the uncertainty of the damages, and it can be considered an add-up to the standard "average damage". Our computations show the addition to be significant, but highly sensitive to the coefficient of relative risk aversion. Once the climate change damage function incorporates the risk premium into the model, results show a substantial increase in both mitigation and adaptation, reflecting a more conservative attitude by the social planner. Interestingly, adaptation is stimulated more than mitigation in the first half of the century, while the situation reverses afterwards. Over the century, the risk premium correction fosters more mitigation, which doubles, than adaptation, which rises by about 80%.

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The optimal paths of climate change mitigation and adaptation under certainty and uncertainty

Cited by 24 publications

References 0 publications

Perceptions and communication strategies for the many uncertainties relevant for climate policy

Perceptions and communication strategies for the many uncertainties relevant for climate policy

The political economy of mitigation and adaptation

Building Uncertainty into the Adaptation Cost Estimation in Integrated Assessment Models

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