How to cite: Selin, N., Giang, A., and Clark, W.: Modeling Dynamic Systems for Sustainable Development , EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-15327, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-15327, 2024.

Normative uncertainty, which arises from diverse ethical perspectives and uncertainty about distributional outcomes, poses a significant hurdle in climate policy negotiations. Such uncertainty illustrates the core challenge of achieving agreement on the moral principles or equity considerations that should guide the development of climate policies.

Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), while influential in shaping decisions, fall short in factoring in this normative uncertainty in climate policies. To address this issue, we developed an IAM framework called JUSTICE. JUSTICE leverages the economic insights of the RICE50+ model to explicitly account for spatiotemporal heterogeneity alongside probabilistic forecasting of the FaIR climate model for a better representation of climate uncertainty. We also reformulate the Social Welfare Function (SWF) in light of four distributive justice principles - Utilitarian, Sufficientarian, Egalitarian, and Prioritarian - to encapsulate the ethical pluralism of different stakeholders. 

We search for adaptive mitigation policies by assimilating two established decision-making frameworks: Multi-Objective Robust Decision-Making (MORDM) and Evolutionary Multi-Objective Direct Policy Search (EMODPS). MORDM rigorously tests potential policies against deep uncertainties to find robust, Pareto-optimal choices. At the same time, EMODPS fine-tunes strategies to reconcile stakeholders' diverse objectives, ensuring policies are adaptive and robust. 

Our findings demonstrate that adaptive policies facilitate deliberation. They identify common ground among policymakers with diverse perspectives by being robust across multiple realizations of deep uncertainties and flexible enough to accommodate conflicting ethical perspectives. Our approach designs climate policies that are both inclusive and adaptive, ensuring they account for immediate necessities while remaining responsive to unfolding future challenges—thereby upholding the tenets of both intra and intergenerational justice. 

 In summary, our study underscores the pivotal role of normative clarity in facilitating stakeholder dialogue and ensuring that climate policies are scientifically sound and socially equitable. Incorporating diverse normative perspectives and acknowledging normative uncertainties, our adaptive strategies limit overconfidence in climate policies, promote inclusivity without subjecting individuals to undue risks, and redefine the application of IAMs in crafting fair and just climate policies.

Keywords: Integrated Assessment Models, Climate policy, Distributive justice, Deep Uncertainty, Adaptive strategies, Social Welfare Function, Robust decision-making.

How to cite: Biswas, P., Zatarain Salazar, J., and Kwakkel, J.: Adaptive Strategies to Reconcile Diverse Equity Preferences in Climate Policies, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-4387, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-4387, 2024.

Human well-being has been defined as an inherently multidimensional concept that broadly refers to what constitutes the “good life”. Stiglitz et al. (2009). Well-being cannot be described with a single number. Rather, it requires a wide range of measures of the state of human outcomes. Taken together, these can provide a description of well-being and to better guide decision making.

Here we summarize a set of interdisciplinary conversations that occurred during the course of a two-day, in-person workshop convened by PNNL September 27-28, 2023 in College Park, Maryland, which laid the foundations for a new field of well-being science and application. Here we share a summary of the key themes and recommendations from this workshop.

Themes

The Science of Human Well-being: Understanding well-being requires assembling both quantitative and qualitative data at multiple scales in time, space, and other dimensions, identifying and articulating relationships using tools and techniques drawing from multiple disciplines and applying them to both understand the past and explore the consequences of alternative decisions for the future. Participants identified specific challenges with current model capabilities, data, incorporating qualitative information, metrics, and scenarios.

Applications of Human Well-being Research: The goal of developing a scientific understanding of well-being is to have tools that can inform decisions. Applying the tools of well-being science has two distinct benefits. First, the multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary tools and data enable better decisions. In addition, the use of well-being science to inform decisions can improve the direction of research and its quality. Participants identified challenges with connecting decision makers and researchers and with policy design and implementation.

Communication of Human Well-being Outcomes: Well-being science needs to communicate across the full spectrum of stakeholders, decision makers, and researchers. The interdisciplinary nature of well-being science results in a language barrier that needs to be overcome within the well-being science community and with stakeholders. Participants discussed challenges with identifying the “correct” stakeholders and communication across all of these groups.

Recommendations

Establish a new field of human well-being science and research: Opportunities for improving communication include (1) developing a Community of Practice on human well-being for researchers and policy makers from different academic and policy domains, (2) holding additional workshops to connect researchers and end users, and (3) writing a commentary piece for an academic journal describing the need for this type of research.

Develop and communicate human well-being applications for decision-making: A primary need identified is for significant model developments and research, as there is currently a mismatch between the types of questions being asked by decision makers and the ability to model those outcomes.

Develop long-term, sustainable funding to support this multi-disciplinary, multi-scale research: The most important recommendation was to increase funding for research and model development. Without this funding, researchers will not be able to provide the analyses and results that decision makers need to account for aspects of equity and justice in their decisions.

 Reference: Stiglitz, J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J.-P. (2009). Report of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/8131721/8131772/Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi-Commission-report.pdf

How to cite: Waldhoff, S., O'Neill, B., Edmonds, J., and Tarekegne, B.: Themes and Recommendations from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Human Well-being Workshop, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-21164, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-21164, 2024.

How to cite: Andrijevic, M., Zimm, C., Moyer, J., Muttarak, R., and Pachauri, S.: Why representing gender (in)equality in climate change scenarios matters for the challenges space  , EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-12512, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-12512, 2024.

 Highlights

• We attribute variation across global climate mitigation scenarios to three factors
• The three factors are climate ambition, scenario background and model choice
• Many indicators are well-explained by the average effects of one or two factors
• We also calculate the residual not explained by these average effects
• This shows which indicators give outliers for some specific input combinations

Abstract

We attribute variations in key energy sector indicators across global climate mitigation scenarios to climate ambition, assumptions in background socioeconomic scenarios, differences between models and an unattributed portion that depends on the interaction between these. The scenarios assessed have been generated by Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) as part of a model intercomparison project exploring the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) used by the climate science community. Climate ambition plays the most significant role in explaining many energy-related indicators, particularly those relevant to overall energy supply, the use of fossil fuels, final energy carriers and emissions. The role of socioeconomic background scenarios is more prominent for indicators influenced by population and GDP growth, such as those relating to final energy demand and nuclear energy. Variations across some indicators, including hydro, solar and wind generation, are largely attributable to inter-model differences. Our Shapley-Owen decomposition gives an unexplained residual not due to the average effects of the other factors, highlighting some (such as the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) for fossil fuels, or adopting hydrogen as an energy carrier) with outlier results for particular ambition-scenario-model combinations. This suggests guidance to policymakers on these indicators is the least robust.

Graphical Abstract

Keywords

Energy transition, climate change mitigation, Integrated Assessment Models, Shapley-Owen decomposition

How to cite: Al Khourdajie, A., Skea, J., and Green, R.: Climate ambition, background scenario or the model? Attribution of the variance of energy-related indicators in global scenarios, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-656, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-656, 2024.

Chronic traffic related air pollution (TRAP) exposure is linked to various adverse health outcomes including pediatric and adult asthma incidence, but more importantly can also lead to premature mortality. In the U.S., the majority of people living close to high volume and density roadways are people of color who are exposed to disproportionate levels of associated health harming primary and secondary air pollutants such as NO_x (NO + NO₂; key precursors for O₃ formation) and PM_2.5 as well as greenhouse gases (e.g. CO₂). Both heavy- and light-duty vehicles (HDVs/LDVs) contribute to on-road TRAP but on a per vehicle basis, the associated air quality and public health impacts are larger for HDVs. One potential climate mitigation strategy is the shift of the transportation sector to battery powered alternatives (EVs). However, the associated air quality, health and equity implications of such a transition are not well understood and lack characterization at fine intra-urban spatial scales.

Given non-linear atmospheric chemistry associated with the formation of secondary pollutants (e.g O₃), and the steep spatial gradients exhibited by short lived TRAP (e.g.  NO₂), here we use the two-way coupled Weather Research Forecast and Community Multiscale Air Quality (WRF-CMAQ) chemical transport model at 1.3 km to determine changes in simulated NO₂, O₃ and PM_2.5 concentrations from the electrification of 30% of HDVs and LDVs over a central U.S. Midwestern domain. We represent changes in on-road, refueling and idling emissions as well as power plant emissions from the increased electricity demand needed for charging. Altered emissions are then used as inputs to run a month-long simulation for each season. Incorporating high resolution concentration changes with census tract level health data, we estimate changes in health impacts at the census tract level and across different population subgroups.

We find that electrifying 30% of primarily diesel-fueled HDVs reduces NOx emissions by a factor of 10 for each vehicle mile compared to the NOx reductions associated with electrifying 30% of LDVs. We simulate domain-wide annual mean NO₂ (~-10%) and PM_2.5 (~-2%) reductions that peak along major roadways, however MDA8O₃ concentrations increase in urban cores. If 30% HDVs and LDVs are electrified, we estimate that 1,120 and 170 annual premature deaths linked to NO₂ and PM_2.5 would be avoided, respectively while 80 annual premature deaths associated with MDA8O₃ would be added. Additionally, we find that the largest simulated air quality and health benefits are within communities of color. Notably, we find that while the domain as a whole is only 12% Black, communities with the largest NO₂-related health benefits are 45% Black.   

Our results demonstrate that incentives aimed at reducing transportation related emissions, especially from HDVs, are beneficial from a climate perspective but also from an air quality, health and economic perspective with the potential to reduce long standing environmental injustices.

How to cite: Camilleri, S. F., Montgomery, A., Visa, M., Schnell, J. L., Adelman, Z., Janssen, M., Grubert, E., Anenberg, S. C., and Horton, D. E.: Air quality, health and equity impacts of transport electrification in the U.S. Midwest. , EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-9358, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-9358, 2024.

The success of the targets established in the European Green Deal depends on the correct design of ambitious policies that utilize all available instruments, including energy and environmental taxation. In the “Fit for 55” package, the EC proposed a deep reform of the Energy Taxation Directive (New ETD) to update the current taxation and align it with current environmental goals. However, due to the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, and the risk of regressive effects the current proposal of the EC is stalled. Therefore, this analysis seeks to provide new evidence from a microsimulation model developed to assess the direct, overnight distributional impacts of the proposed new ETD reform on households. Our aim is to explore whether the proposed EU-level polluter pays instruments can be designed to achieve progressive distributional impacts, to identify policy options that ensure they strengthen social justice without undermining it, and thereby remove social barriers. Moreover, we explore a dimension often underrepresented in distributional analyses, namely gender. Our results indicate that, with the correct design from the outset, environmental tax reforms can be progressive and not increase current inequalities between and within Member States of the EU, including those related to gender.

How to cite: García-Muros, X., Alonso-Epelde, E., González-Eguino, M., and Rodríguez-Zúñiga, A.: Can energy and environmental taxation be progressive in the EU?, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-10785, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-10785, 2024.

Sustainable development aims for equal living standards in the Global North and Global South while limiting global warming as much as possible. If measured in monetary terms, it is well known that eradicating extreme poverty (so lifting people beyond $PPP 2.15 consumption expenditure per capita (pc) per day) does not threaten climate goals. However, just beyond extreme poverty is not an acceptable goal for the living standards of people. In Europe, for instance, people live between $PPP 30pc and $PPP 70pc on average depending on the country. Moreover, some research has shown that lifting all people globally to only $PPP 5.5pc per day already implies allocating a much bigger carbon budget share for poverty eradication given current techno-economic parameters. Hence, if global poverty is to be reduced substantially, high-income nations and groups require a more rapid reduction of emissions so that global climate goals remain met. Therefore, in this research, I explore global convergence scenarios of incomes, taking between-country inequality and within-country inequality into account. I do so based on data from the World Inequality Lab and consider the following constraints and parameters: (i) income level towards which countries and groups converge (e.g. $PPP 30pc consumption expenditure a day or $PPP 50pc and so forth) (ii) carbon budgets, (iii) time horizon (for example whether convergence happens until 2050, 2075 or 2100 and so forth) and (iv) technology evolution (the pace of carbon intensity reduction). By studying the trade-offs between these, I elaborate on possible growth pathways for low-income countries and low-income groups world-wide, and corresponding degrowth or steady-state pathways in Global North countries and high-income groups world-wide. I find, for example, that, if all high-income nations continue historic growth trajectories while low- and middle-income countries converge to an acceptably high level of income, strict carbon budgets are difficult to maintain and hence high-income countries might consider steady-state or degrowth trajectories to free up “growth space” in low-income countries. The results may inform country-specific and income-group specific climate-economic scenarios in integrated assessment models and the wider policy debate.   

How to cite: Oswald, Y.: Global convergence of incomes in a climate-constrained world, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-15637, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-15637, 2024.

The equity implications brought on by climate change and the actions taken in response are a growing area of interest. Such implications are important for the design and implementation of transformative policies but are understudied at subnational levels, especially with considerations to impacts on human well-being. Specifically, integrated assessment models (IAMs), the primary tools for evaluating these policies and their implications, have advanced science and policymaking but lack detailed subnational information. In this study, we developed projections of U.S. state-level income distributions (Casper et al., 2023), represented by income deciles, and incorporated those projections into an IAM (GCAM-USA) to examine the effects of decarbonization policies on residential energy security, a key aspect of human well-being, across ten income groups in each state. Importantly, our projections of residential energy security include several metrics in order to represent the multi-faceted nature of energy security and to explore tradeoffs that consumers at different income levels may need to make in response to changing energy prices. Specifically, we estimate energy service consumption, the satiation gap, and energy burden for each decile. Our study identifies unequal impacts across groups, with the most significant impact observed among mid-to-low income groups. In 2050, the projected energy burden is lower than in 2020 due to the projected increase in income over time relative to changes in energy service prices. However, the lowest income group in most states still experiences ‘high’ energy burden in 2050 under business-as-usual, while the decarbonization policies leads to even higher energy burden for the lowest income group (households spending additional 0.6% out of income for residential energy services).With the lowest income groups experiencing worse outcomes, this work suggests that targeted policy interventions that consider the impacts on different groups will promote more equitable transitions to a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy. The results focus solely on the impacts of decarbonization policies on residential energy security metrics, excluding other potential positive effects on human well-being like reductions in air pollution.

References

Casper, K. C., Narayan, K. B., O’Neill, B. C., Waldhoff, S. T., Zhang, Y., & Wejnert-Depue, C. P. (2023). Non-parametric projections of the net-income distribution for all U.S. states for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. Environmental Research Letters, 18(11), 114001. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acf9b8

How to cite: Casper, K., Zhang, Y., Waldhoff, S., and O'Neill, B.: Analyzing energy security outcomes of decarbonization across income groups in GCAM-USA, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-21402, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-21402, 2024.

Under climate change, heat waves are expected to become more frequent, more intense, and longer representing a risk factor in mortality and morbidity and a significant threat to public health [1]. In this study, we have performed a mortality impact assessment due to heat in European regions estimating the number of deaths related to mortality in each European country.

Our dataset includes the relative risk of death related to high-temperature data, as well as baseline mortality (2013) and projections (2030, 2050, and 2070) for adults over 65 years. We have calculated the number of deaths attributed to heat using the World Health Organization (WHO) relative risk model [2]. Adaptation was partly incorporated into the assessment by adjusting the optimum temperature in future periods under 4 combinations of climate and socioeconomic scenarios (RCP2.6-SSP1, RCP4.5-SSP2, RCP7.0-SSP3 and RCP8.5-SSP5) based on the latest CMIP6 data.

Preliminary results show that heat-related risk and the number of deaths increase with time, as expected. In the short term (2030), the increase in mortality measured as the ratio between projected and baseline mortality, does not change much across scenarios. The average rate of daily deaths for the EU27 is 2.054 (1.766,2.354) under SSP1-2.6 (the central estimate is the median, and percentiles 10 and 90 have been used for the interval), and 2.244 (1.853,2.694) in SSP5-8.5. Mortality increases over time, although it varies greatly depending on the scenario considered. By 2070 the number of fatalities reach 3.529 (2.849,4.88) in SSP1-2.6 and 7.658 (5.984,10.07) in SSP5-8.5. We also find significant differences across countries. By 2070, under a middle-row scenario (SSP2-4.5), countries such as Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and Sweden present an increase in mortality between 2 and 3 fold baseline mortality. Others, mostly in Southern Europe such as Greece, France, Malta, Italy or Cyprus, but also Luxemburg and Slovenia, have a severe increase in mortality, 5 to 9 times baseline mortality.

We also estimated the annual number of deaths in the EU27 due to extreme heat. In the baseline, our results are 72,955 annual deaths, which exceeds previous estimates, such as that obtained for the summer of 2022 [6], but this difference could be linked to the use of more recent CMIP6 data. In 2070, the number of heat-induced deaths in the EU could reach 211.039 (140.686,293.409) in SSP1-2.6 and 435.331 (283.927,671.089) in SSP5-8.5. Some studies [3] show that, under RCP8.5, annual mortality will possibly increase by up to 300,000 excess deaths by the last quarter of the 21st century, accounting for exposures above the minimum mortality temperature, including extremely hot temperatures, so our figures do not differ much of these estimates, even though they are higher than some others [4, 5].

How to cite: Loroño Leturiondo, A., Markandya, A., and Sainz de Murieta, E.: Heat-related mortality projections for 335 European NUTs3 regions, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-17982, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-17982, 2024.