Carbon Lorenz Curves revisited: Do the Paris Agreement and its Nationally Determined Contributions reflect a more equitable future emissions pathway?

Climate change and its consequences threaten human development and lead to environmental inequality: The inequality is two-sided, both in terms of historic and current contribution to global emissions and how countries are impacted by the resulting climate change. This generated an important debate about historic responsibility of developed countries and the need for sustainable growth pathways for developing countries. This conference contribution looks into the equality dimension of the Paris Climate Agreement and its (Intended) Nationally Determined Contributions, (I)NDCs. We use the Gini index and the Lorenz curves to assess the carbon equity performance of the (I)NDCs. We compare the Gini index of annual and cumulative national average per capita GHG emissions for the time frame 2015-2030 of conditional and unconditional (I)NDCs and set this into perspective with the recent evolution of GHG emissions equality. Our results show that the (I)NDCs, while not meeting the Paris temperature goal, lead towards a more equitable future, though at a slower rate and mostly attributed to efforts by developing countries

What are the implications of the Paris Agreement for inequality?

Climate change is a major planetary challenge. Its consequences threaten the provision of Earth-system services and sustainable development. The impacts and the capacities to adapt vary across countries and different incomes, as do the historical and current emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and thus the responsibility for anthropogenic climate change. This has generated a complex debate about the inequities inherent in the climate challenge. This paper analyses the potential implications of the full implementation of the first round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of the Paris Agreement for countries’ per capita GHG emissions and the related inequality measures of the Gini coefficient and Lorenz curve. The distribution of annual and cumulative GHG emissions per capita for selected years and periods pre- and post-Paris of two NDC scenarios are assessed to derive implications for desired increases in ambition levels. The results show that the NDCs, while not meeting the Paris targets to limit temperature increase if levels of ambition remain the same after 2030, lead towards a more equitable future in terms of GHG emissions

Identifying Sustainability and Knowledge Gaps in Socio-Economic Pathways Vis-à-Vis the Sustainable Development Goals

With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global community has set itself an ambitious development agenda. Current analytical and quantitative modeling capabilities fall short of being able to capture all 17 SDGs and their targets. Even highly ambitious and optimistic pathways currently used in research, such as SSP1/SSP1-2.6, do not meet all SDGs (sustainability gaps) and fail to provide information on some of them (knowledge gaps). We show that for research and modeling purposes, the SDG targets can serve as a basis but need to be operationalized to reduce complexity and also to account for long-term sustainability concerns beyond 2030. We have explored here the requirements for assessing more comprehensively the sustainability of development pathways, guided by holistic interpretation of the SDGs to enable an assessment of the potential embedded synergies and trade-offs between the economic, social and environmental objectives. We see this as call for action for science to work on filling these gaps. At the same time, this is also a call for policy makers and the global community to close the sustainability gaps that emerge from such analysis. We anticipate that such analysis will provide useful information for policy advice and investment decisions during implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda

Improving the Understanding of Electrical Vehicle Technology and Policy Diffusion across Countries

The transport sector is particularly difficult to decarbonize. Use of electric vehicles (EV)—a potentially transformative and sustainable transport technology—can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, domestic fossil fuel demand, energy import dependency, and air pollution. Policies play an important role in the diffusion of new technologies, such as EVs, principally in their formative stage as they compete with an incumbent technology. However, great discrepancies exist across countries regarding EV support and uptake. EV diffusion is conceptualized as an outcome of policy diffusion based on national characteristics and international mechanisms. This study aims to explain the variation in EV policy diffusion across countries, by conducting an event history analysis on EV diffusion (EVs > 1% market share) between 2010 and 2017, using a sample of 60 countries. It identifies characteristics and mechanisms relevant to the novel technology's "formative phase”, focusing on the formation of state goals, international diffusion, and local technology adoption and deployment. The empirical contribution lies in identifying and validating socioeconomic and political factors and the international mechanisms influencing a country's position on the diffusion curve. This can help improve scenarios via better reflecting EV diffusion

Methodological issues in measuring international inequality in technology ownership and infrastructure service use

Access to technologies, infrastructures and their related services are essential for raising global living standards and human well-being. Several of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) deal with providing access to technologies and service infrastructures to the share of global population so far excluded. At the same time, the SDGs, foremost SDG 10 on reducing inequalities within and among countries, promote a more equitable world, both in terms of inter- as well as intra-national equality. To support monitoring progress towards the SDGs, this paper aims to (1) improve measures of international inequality in terms of basic technologies and infrastructure services associated with the SDGs by explicitly taking into account non-access; and (2) to estimate the international inequality of selected SDG technologies and infrastructure services. It does so by advancing, testing, and applying improved measures of international inequality. The paper shows the discrepancies between accounting and not accounting for non-access from an inequality perspective for international inequality for selected technologies (e.g. mobile phones) and infrastructure services (e.g. electricity). By accounting for non-access on the national level, international inequality estimates are improved. Accounting for non-access leads to changes in country rankings, which the development community uses to measure progress in human development

Building back better: Granular energy technologies in green recovery funding programs

Granular energy technologies with smaller unit sizes and costs deploy faster, create more jobs, and distribute benefits more widely than lumpy large-scale alternatives. These characteristics of granularity align with the aims of fiscal stimulus in response to COVID-19. We analyze the technological granularity of 93 green recovery funding programs in France, Germany, South Korea, and the UK that target £72.9 billion for low-carbon energy technologies and infrastructures across five emissions-intensive sectors. We find that South Korea’s “New Deal” program is the most technologically granular with strong weighting toward distributed renewables, smart technologies, electric vehicle charge points, and other relatively low unit cost technologies that are quick to deploy. The UK has the least granular portfolio, concentrating large amounts of public money on small numbers of mega-scale energy projects with high implementation risks. We demonstrate how technological granularity has multiple desirable characteristics of green recovery: jobs, speed, and distributed benefits

The emergence of thinking in systems

Geospatial data and the developments that characterise Geospatial 2.0 provide a thread that will link disparate systems into a comprehensive system-of-systems fit for the future

Putting multidimensional inequalities in human wellbeing at the centre of transitions

Jason Hickel and colleagues reported large inequalities in global resource extraction, which has led to an ecological crisis. Hickel and colleagues show that high-income countries are responsible for 74% of global excess material use of equitable and sustainable boundaries from 1970 to 2017. Therefore, the authors suggested that high-income countries should undergo post-growth and degrowth transformations. Adding to Hickel and colleagues’ convincing assessment, we want to introduce a broader focus on distributive justice in human and planetary wellbeing, which goes beyond resource extraction. We provide a broad view of the multiple dimensions of inequality, capturing enablers (eg, material use) and the effects of resource use that act as barriers to human wellbeing (eg, air pollution). We follow the theory of human needs with the universal goal of avoiding serious harm across the globe and across generations, and enabling capabilities and opportunities needed for a decent life. We argue that such a comprehensive focus on human and planetary wellbeing allows responsibilities to be shared more fairly in any transition process