Potentials and Limits of Bayesian Networks to Deal with Uncertainty in the Assessment of Climate Change Adaptation Policies

Bayesian networks (BNs) have been increasingly applied to support management and decision-making processes under conditions of environmental variability and uncertainty, providing logical and holistic reasoning in complex systems since they succinctly and effectively translate causal assertions between variables into patterns of probabilistic dependence. Through a theoretical assessment of the features and the statistical rationale of BNs, and a review of specific applications to ecological modelling, natural resource management, and climate change policy issues, the present paper analyses the effectiveness of the BN model as a synthesis framework, which would allow the user to manage the uncertainty characterising the definition and implementation of climate change adaptation policies. The review will let emerge the potentials of the model to characterise, incorporate and communicate the uncertainty, with the aim to provide an efficient support to an informed and transparent decision making process. The possible drawbacks arising from the implementation of BNs are also analysed, providing potential solutions to overcome them.Adaptation to Climate Change, Bayesian Network, Uncertainty

Governance and Environmental Policy Integration in Europe: What Can We learn from the EU Emission Trading Scheme?

The European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) is a landmark environmental policy, representing the world’s first large-scale greenhouse gas (GHG) trading program. The coexistence of state actors and top-down processes with stakeholders participation and flexible abatement strategies make the EU ETS a powerful instrument of cross sectoral integration of environmental concerns, which benefits from a high level of interaction among the actors involved and a significant degree of information exchange. However, the same peculiarities of the system make it difficult to identify a correspondence with a single mode of governance. The EU ETS shows characteristics of the decision making processes and institutions engaged, the tools and instruments used as well as the actors involved, which change according to the different levels of governance, and belong both to the old and to the new modes of governance. The emission trading scheme represents a clear example of Multi-Level governance, where the different modes of governance interact among them and affect each other.Environmental Policy Integration, Climate Change, Emission Trading, EU Policy

The Future Prospect of PV and CSP Solar Technologies: An Expert Elicitation Survey

In this paper we present and discuss the results of an expert elicitation survey on solar technologies. Sixteen leading European experts from the academic world, the private sector and international institutions took part in this expert elicitation survey on Photovoltaic (PV) and Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) technologies. The survey collected probabilistic information on (1) how Research, Development and Demonstration (RD&D) investments will impact the future costs of solar technologies and (2) the potential for solar technology deployment both in OECD and non-OECD countries. Understanding the technological progress and the potential of solar PV and CPS technologies is crucial to draft appropriate energy policies. The results presented in this paper are thus relevant for the policy making process and can be used as better input data in integrated assessment and energy models.Expert Elicitation, Research, Development and Demonstration, Solar Technologies

Methodological aspects of recent climate change damage cost studies

This paper discusses methodological aspects of recent climate change damage studies. Assessing the total and/or marginal damage costs of environmental change is often difficult and it is certainly difficult in the case of climate change. A major obstacle is the uncertainty on the physical impacts of climate change, especially related to extreme events and so-called ‘low-probability high-impact’ scenarios. The subsequent transposition of physical impacts into monetary terms is also a delicate step, given that climate change impacts involve both market and non-market goods and services, covering health, environmental and social values, and that impacts may be distant in time and space. The complexity of climate change cost assessment thus involves several crucial dimensions, including non-market evaluation, risk and uncertainty, baseline definition, equity and discounting, further elaborated in this paper in the course of the overview of the literature and of the overview and evaluation of the key methodological issues.Climate change damage costs, cost of inaction, methodological aspects, risk and uncertainty, discounting, equity

International Workshop on Research, Development, and Demonstration to Enhance the Role of Nuclear Energy in Meeting Climate and Energy Challenges

Dramatic growth in nuclear energy would be required for nuclear power to provide a significant part of the carbon-free energy the world is likely to need in the 21st century, or a major part in meeting other energy challenges. This would require increased support from governments, utilities, and publics around the world. Achieving that support is likely to require improved economics and major progress toward resolving issues of nuclear safety, proliferation-resistance, and nuclear waste management. This is likely to require both research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) of improved technologies and new policy approaches. To gather information on the RD&D needs for the future of nuclear energy, the future cost and performance of nuclear technologies, and on the major barriers to large-scale deployment of nuclear energy, a team of researchers at Harvard University and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) conducted two coordinated surveys of nuclear experts. The surveys asked experts how much they would recommend that their governments spend on nuclear energy RD&D; what progress in cost and performance might be expected by 2030 if those recommendations were followed; and what other factors might constrain or promote future nuclear energy growth. Leading experts from the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (E.U.) participated in this expert elicitation surveys during the summer and fall of 2010. In April 2011, the FEEM and Harvard teams held a workshop in Venice, Italy with a subset of the participating E.U. and U.S. experts to present and discuss the results of the elicitations, in an effort to understand where there is consensus and where the most important disputes and uncertainties lie. Given the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, the meeting opened with a discussion of the significance of that event for the future of nuclear power, and of the main lessons learned

The economic impact of the Green Certificate market through the Macro Multiplier approach

In the last decade, as many other European countries, the Italian Government adopted several reforms in order to increase the use of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). The liberalization of the electricity market that represent one of these reforms aims to reach environmental benefits from the substitution of fossil fuel with renewable sources.The Italian Green Certificate market was introduced in 2002 in order to accomplish this objective and represents a mechanism where a quota of renewable electricity is imposed to suppliers in proportion to their sales. The electricity industries are obliged to meet this condition by producing the quantity of renewable electricity by means of a change in their production process, otherwise they must buy a number of certificates corresponding to the quota. This mechanism changes the importance of the electricity industry first in promoting climate protection, than in terms of the impact in the economy as a whole. A policy aimed to develop the market of green certificates may lead to environmental improvement by switching the energy production process to renewable resources. But above all an increase in demand for green certificates, resultant from a reform on the quota of renewable electricity, can generate positive change in all components of the industrial production. For this purpose, the paper aims to quantify the economic impact of a reform on Green Certificate market for the Italian system by means of the Macro Multiplier (MM) approach. The analysis is performed through the Hybrid Input-Output (I-O) model that allows expressing the energy flows in physical terms (GWh) while all other flows are expressed in monetary terms (e). Moreover, through the singular value decomposition of the inverse matrix of the model, which reveals the set of key structures of the exogenous change of final demand, we identify the appropriate key structure able to obtain both the expected positive total output change and the increase of electricity production from RES