The ecological footprint remains a misleading metric of global sustainability

Linus Blomqvist, Barry W. Brook, Erle C. Ellis, Peter M. Kareiva, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberge

Priority for the Worse Off and the Social Cost of Carbon

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary measure of the harms from carbon emission. Specifically, it is the reduction in current consumption that produces a loss in social welfare equivalent to that caused by the emission of a ton of CO2. The standard approach is to calculate the SCC using a discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (SWF)—one that simply adds up the well-being numbers (utilities) of individuals, as discounted by a weighting factor that decreases with time. The discounted-utilitarian SWF has been criticized both for ignoring the distribution of well-being, and for including an arbitrary preference for earlier generations. Here, we use a prioritarian SWF, with no time-discount factor, to calculate the SCC in the integrated assessment model RICE. Prioritarianism is a well-developed concept in ethics and theoretical welfare economics, but has been, thus far, little used in climate scholarship. The core idea is to give greater weight to well-being changes affecting worse off individuals. We find substantial differences between the discounted-utilitarian and non-discounted prioritarian SCC

Carbon Pricing in Climate Policy: Seven Reasons, Complementary Instruments, and Political Economy Considerations

Carbon pricing is a recurrent theme in debates on climate policy. Discarded at the 2009 COP in Copenhagen, it remained part of deliberations for a climate agreement in subsequent years. As there is still much misunderstanding about the many reasons to implement a global carbon price, ideological resistance against it prospers. Here, we present the main arguments for carbon pricing, to stimulate a fair and well-informed discussion about it. These include considerations that have received little attention so far. We stress that a main reason to use carbon pricing is environmental effectiveness at a relatively low cost, which in turn contributes to enhance social and political acceptability of climate policy. This includes the property that corrected prices stimulate rapid environmental innovations. These arguments are underappreciated in the public debate, where pricing is frequently downplayed and the erroneous view that innovation policies are sufficient is widespread. Carbon pricing and technology policies are, though, largely complementary and thus are both needed for effective climate policy. We also comment on the complementarity of other instruments to carbon pricing. We further discuss distributional consequences of carbon pricing and present suggestions on how to address these. Other political economy issues that receive attention are lobbying, co-benefits, international policy coordination, motivational crowding in/out, and long-term commitment. The overview ends with reflections on implementing a global carbon price, whether through a carbon tax or emissions trading. The discussion goes beyond traditional arguments from environmental economics by including relevant insights from energy research and innovation studies as well

Sustainable Land Use: Methodology and Application

The chapters in this volume are edited versions of papers presented at the NATO Ad- vanced Research Workshop on Environmental Change Adaptation and Security held in Budapest, Hungary, from October 16 - 18, 1997. As is evident in this volume, the papers ranged from descriptions of environmental and health issues in Russia and Eastern Europe to models of sustainable land use. This diversity of perspectives on environ- ment and security is indicative of both the breadth of this new area of research as well as the varied background of the researchers involved. The discussions at the NATO workshop were remarkably animated and exciting, not surprising given the interest in the topic. I think this vitality is reflected in the papers in this volume as well. The main purpose of the NATO ARW is to foster research links among researchers from NATO countries and Central and Eastern European States, Russia, and the Newly Independent States. In editing this volume, a decision was made to keep to the spirit of this purpose and-if at all possible-include all papers prepared for the workshop. This required extensive editing and rewriting of some of the papers (and consequent delays in production). A determination was made early in the process by the workshop steering committee that the value of publishing the entire collection of articles out- weighed the advantages of accepting only a limited number

Global economic impacts of climate variability and change during the 20th century

Estimates of the global economic impacts of observed climate change during the 20th century obtained by applying five impact functions of different integrated assessment models (IAMs) are separated into their main natural and anthropogenic components. The estimates of the costs that can be attributed to natural variability factors and to the anthropogenic intervention with the climate system in general tend to show that: 1) during the first half of the century, the amplitude of the impacts associated with natural variability is considerably larger than that produced by anthropogenic factors and the effects of natural variability fluctuated between being negative and positive. These non-monotonic impacts are mostly determined by the low-frequency variability and the persistence of the climate system; 2) IAMs do not agree on the sign (nor on the magnitude) of the impacts of anthropogenic forcing but indicate that they steadily grew over the first part of the century, rapidly accelerated since the mid 1970's, and decelerated during the first decade of the 21st century. This deceleration is accentuated by the existence of interaction effects between natural variability and natural and anthropogenic forcing. The economic impacts of anthropogenic forcing range in the tenths of percentage of the world GDP by the end of the 20th century; 3) the impacts of natural forcing are about one order of magnitude lower than those associated with anthropogenic forcing and are dominated by the solar forcing; 4) the interaction effects between natural and anthropogenic factors can importantly modulate how impacts actually occur, at least for moderate increases in external forcing. Human activities became dominant drivers of the estimated economic impacts at the end of the 20th century, producing larger impacts than those of low-frequency natural variability. Some of the uses and limitations of IAMs are discussed

After 35 years of rebound research in economics : where do we stand?

The phenomenon of rebound effects has sparked considerable academic, policy and press debate over the effectiveness of energy efficiency policy. In recent years, a plethora of theoretical and empirical rebound studies have been published, fueling the discussion but also raising further issues and unanswered questions. At the same time it seems that there is a lack of understanding of how to treat and measure central aspects such as potential energy savings expected and the energy services impacted by an efficiency increase. Moreover, there is a lack of clarity and understanding in how we move from micro to macro levels of analysis and reporting. In terms of policy understanding the crux of the problem is that there is no such thing as a simple formula for all aspects of rebound. The aim of this chapter is to clarify the correct perspective on how to look at economic dimensions of re-bound, with particular attention to what policy-makers can do with rebound analysis and findings. Further, we attempt to synthesize existing rebound taxonomies and to provide, in a concise manner, the economic rebound mechanisms at work. We then approach the rebound theme from both micro and macro perspectives, before bringing the two angles together. Overall, we argue that both policymakers and re-searchers need to be aware that rebound is an issue that ought to be tackled at multiple levels and that there are policy trade-offs, especially between economic growth and ecological sustainability. This may be resolved at least to a certain extent by welfare considerations

Scientists’ warning on affluence

For over half a century, worldwide growth in affluence has continuously increased resource use and pollutant emissions far more rapidly than these have been reduced through better technology. The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions. We summarise the evidence and present possible solution approaches. Any transition towards sustainability can only be effective if far-reaching lifestyle changes complement technological advancements. However, existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change

Computational and mathematical approaches to societal transitions

After an introduction of the theoretical framework and concepts of transition studies, this article gives an overview of how structural change in social systems has been studied from various disciplinary perspectives. This overview first leads to the conclusion that computational and mathematical approaches and their practical form, modeling, up till now, have been almost absent in the research and theorizing of structural change or transitions in social systems. Second, this review of the social science literature suggests numerous theoretical constructs relevant for transition modeling. Relevant concepts include the conceptualization of the micro-to-macro link, the importance of explaining both stability and change, quantitative and qualitative definitions of structural change, the use of dichotomies, synchronic and diachronic reasoning in explaining structural change, definitions of basic patterns of social change, the conceptualization of resistance to change and intentional and normative aspects of social change. This article employs these theoretical concepts to describe and discuss the models presented in this special issue in order to develop an understanding of what exactly entails a computational or mathematical approach to societal transitions