Debat: Historien kan sælges

One of the permanent concerns in the international scenario is the study of the consequences of nuclear and radiological accidents and other events that lead to the contamination of the environment and the exposure of members of the public as a consequence of this contamination. Decision-making in such situations need to be based in solid technical criteria but must also take into account the actual prevailing circumstance in order to reach optimized measures to protect people and the environment. The Multi-criteria Analysis Method is already being used for similar applications in some European countries but it is necessary that the criteria are established taking in account economic, social and climatic aspects that can affect the selection of protective measures applicable to specific regions, and the selection of the different weights to be associated to the different criteria that are to be applied to different social-politic environments. The present work describes the developments to support the decision making process for the implementation of protective measures to protect the public in situations of radiological accidents in Brazil, the steps already developed and the current status of the system under development, discusses the difficulties found and stresses the needs for future developments

Interactions between climate change mitigation and adaptation: The case of hydropower in Brazil

This paper performs a multi-model comparison to assess strategies for adaptation to climate change impacts in hydropower generation in Brazil under two Representative Concentration Pathways. The approach used allows for evaluating the interactions between climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies under low and high impact scenarios through 2050. Climate change impact projections of sixteen General Circulation Models indicate that a global high emissions trajectory scenario would likely yield more severe impacts on hydropower generation than a mitigation scenario. Adaptation modeling suggests that climate change impacts can be compensated by a wide range of alternatives, whose optimality will depend on the level of mitigation effort pursued. Our results show that climate change impacts would lead to even higher emissions in the absence of climate change mitigation policies. On the other hand, mitigation strategies to pursue lower emissions are maintained under climate change impacts, meaning that mitigation strategies are robust when faced with adaptation challenges. Mitigation efforts could yield a more diverse and less carbon intensive mix of technological options for adaptation. When analyzing investment costs to adapt to climate change impacts, in some cases mitigation can lead to a lower total investment level

ENGAGE Global Scenarios

This data set includes global climate change mitigation scenarios as summarized by Riahi et al., 2021. The scenarios are developed as part of the ENGAGE project and were assessed in terms of the their investment implications (Bertram et al., 2021), their land-use dynamics (Hasegawa et al., 2021) as we all as with respect to their costs and benefits (Drouret et al., 2021). The scenarios include a current national policies scenario and an NDC scenario that depict relevant near-term GHG emission tends and targets. In the long-term, two types of CO2 emission budgets are implemented, so called “net-zero budgets” and “end-of-century” budgets. The “net-zero-budget” scenarios assume climate policies that limit the remaining cumulative CO2 emissions until net zero CO2 emissions are reached. These scenarios limit the temperature overshoot and do not rely on global net-negative CO2 emissions to keep warming below the intended temperature limit. In contrast, the “end-of-century budget” scenarios assume long-term climate policies that limit cumulative CO2 emissions over the full course of the 21st century. Depending on the availability of carbon dioxide removal options, these scenarios may comprise high temperature overshoot and global net negative CO2 emissions in the second half of the century. The near-term dimension of current national policies until 2020 or NDCs until 2030 is then combined with reaching the net-zero and full-century CO2 emissions budgets. To cover a relevant range of temperature outcomes (which in addition to the budgets themselves also determined by mitigation of non-CO2 GHG and aerosol emissions), the budgets are varied between 200 and 3000 GtCO2 in steps of 50 – 500 GtCO2. The data is available for download at the ENGAGE Scenario Explorer. The license permits use of the scenario ensemble for scientific research and science communication, but restricts redistribution of substantial parts of the data. Please refer to the FAQ and legal code for more information