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Pathways to achieve the dual targets of carbon neutrality and air quality in Southern China
No full textRealizing the 2060 carbon neutrality target and air quality goals simultaneously is a common challenge for provinces in China aiming for sustainable development. This study examines the costs and benefits of achieving these dual targets in six southern Chinese provinces. Using a multi-model assessment approach—comprising the economic IMED∣CGE model, the environmental GAINS model, and the IMED∣HEL health risk assessment model—this study captures the uneven air quality and health burdens associated with inter-regional economic connections. We found that achieving carbon neutrality significantly improves air quality and provides health co-benefits through rapid energy system transformation. However, there is substantial provincial heterogeneity in the pathways chosen to reduce pollution and carbon emissions. As the potential of end-of-pipe control measures diminishes, stricter air quality standards will depend increasingly on profound transformations in energy and economic systems driven by carbon neutrality goals. Carbon reduction policies will reshape trade structures, altering the flow of embodied carbon dioxide (CO2) and air pollutants. Additionally, provincial carbon quotas significantly influence the health-related net benefits of carbon reduction, as GDP losses are sensitive to the allocation of these quotas. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of simultaneously achieving CO2 emission reduction and air quality improvement. Policymakers should integrate air quality targets with low-carbon development objectives when creating regional blueprints for green transformation, thereby aligning air pollution and carbon reduction management organically
Scaling up carbon dioxide removals – Recommendations for navigating opportunities and risks in the EU
Get PDFThe damages caused by climate change are already being felt globally and across Europe, and the risk of crossing tipping points is growing. As the fastest-warming continent, Europe faces increasingly severe climate impacts such as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods. These events not only threaten Europeans’ health, water resources and ecosystems, but also food and energy security, infrastructure and financial stability. 2024 was the warmest year on record, with a global average temperature of 1.6°C above the pre-industrial level. This first exceedance of the 1.5°C warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement underscores the urgency of taking action to stop global warming and keep long-term warming under 1.5°C, to reduce the likelihood of extreme weather events and avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.
Concretely, global greenhouse gas emissions must be kept within a finite greenhouse gas budget, which represents the maximum cumulative emissions that can be released while still limiting temperature rise. Exceeding this budget would significantly increase the risk of severe and irreversible climate impacts. As the remaining budget is shrinking rapidly, global efforts must focus on drastically cutting greenhouse gases while simultaneously removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through capture and durable storage. Balancing emissions and removals to reach net zero – and eventually net-negative emissions, where removals exceed emissions – is essential to halting global warming and ultimately decreasing temperatures. Although net-negative emissions cannot reverse past climate impacts or undo the crossing of tipping points, they would restore atmospheric greenhouse gas levels to within safer limits and help to manage temperature overshoots.
To support global efforts in the fight against climate change, the EU is committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions domestically within the EU by 2050 at the latest, and pursuing net-negative greenhouse gas emissions thereafter. This requires deep emission reductions, as well as a rapid and sustainable scale-up of removals to counterbalance residual emissions from activities that currently have no or limited mitigation alternatives (for example, heavy industry, long-distance air and maritime transport, and agriculture). Emission reductions and carbon dioxide removals should be pursued in parallel, and one cannot substitute for the other: efforts to scale up removals should not deter the EU from accelerating investments to support drastic emission reductions
CETD, a global compound events detection and visualisation toolbox and dataset
Get PDFCompound events (CEs) are attracting increased attention due to their significant societal and ecological impacts. However, their inherent complexity can pose challenges for climate scientists and practitioners, highlighting the need for a more approachable and intuitive framework for detecting and visualising CEs. Here, we introduce the Compound Events Toolbox and Dataset (CETD), which provides the first integrated, interactive, and extensible platform for CE detection and visualisation. Employing observations, reanalysis, and model simulations, CETD can quantify the frequency, duration, and severity of multiple CE types: multivariate, sequential, and concurrent events. It can analyse CEs often linked to severe impacts on human health, wildfires, and air pollution, such as hot-dry, wet-windy, and hot-dry-stagnation events. To validate the performance of CETD, we conduct statistical analyses for several high-impact events, such as the 2019 Australian wildfires and the 2022 European heatwaves. The accessibility and extensibility of CETD will benefit the broader community by enabling them to better understand and prepare for the risks and challenges posed by CEs in a warming world
Revisiting two-layer energy balance models for climate assessment
Get PDFGiven the pivotal role of probabilistic approaches with two-layer energy balance models in the latest climate assessment, this study aims to gain deeper insight into their advancement by comparing different approaches for generating constrained posterior ensembles. Several methodological improvements are possible both in the calibration of model parameters to the behavior of comprehensive Earth system models and in constraining the calibrated parameter ensemble with other lines of evidence. The results imply that a conventional single parameter representing evolving climate feedback characteristics is not a requirement for reliable climate projections; rather, there are potential improvements on the forcing side regarding the separation of forcing and feedbacks. Constraining the ensemble based on observational and expert-assessed climate metrics, which critically affects probabilistic climate assessment, needs to appropriately deal with different constraints on a multivariate space in a standardized and flexible way. The method introduced here is an option that fulfills the need
Integrating Global Comparability and National Specificity in Agricultural Sustainability Indicators Through Stakeholder‐Science Co‐Evaluation in Austria
Get PDFAgriculture is central to sustainable development both from provisioning and pressure perspectives. It is hence imperative to measure its diverse outcomes, for which various global indicator systems have been developed. Yet, these come with trade-offs, for example, between comparability among countries versus specificity to national context. This poses the question how relevant generic indicators are for national stakeholders and how specific information requirements can be integrated within a globally comparable assessment. Herein, we present the co-evaluation of an existing system of global agricultural sustainability indicators with national stakeholders from agricultural practice, research and education, public administration, private sector, and NGOs in Austria, representing an expert community. Focusing on the relevance of the indicators and the requirements for complementary metrics, we found that particularly social themes and related indicators were highly specific to the national context, followed by economic and environmental aspects. Co-interpretation of selected indicator trajectories showed that drivers and interactions were highly complex and may change over time, emphasizing also the importance of complementary contextual information. Yet, availability of data to measure indicators proposed by stakeholders remains a key limitation to the adaptation of the indicator system. We outline two options for improving the relevance of the global indicator system: (a) substituting less relevant indicators or (b) introducing a second tier covering regionally important aspects. To explore which of the two options is most appropriate across geographies and whether unified approaches to such a regionalization are indeed feasible, we propose to include the co-creation of regionalized indicator frameworks in future iterations across agriculturally diverse countries
Report on Improved Forest models with enhanced representation of behavior and behavioral change of forest owners and conservation managers. BIOCONSENT (Deliverable 3.1)
Get PDFThe complex nature of human decision making has been the focus of studies for decades across several themes, including environment modelling (Groeneveld et al., 2017). Forest management decisions are shaped by many socio-ecological factors and result in different behavioural responses. There are diverse types of forest owners and managers, hereafter collectively referred to as ‘agents’, with a variety of objectives, preferences and behaviour that affect forest management decision-making. It is important to consider these differences in behaviour and behavioural change in forest management decision support tools when assessing the impact of policies, market drivers, and conservation goals on forest environments (e.g., see Brodrechtova et al., 2018 and Sotirov et al., 2019). Distinct methods have been used to represent agent behaviour through integration of influence factors for decision making (e.g., economic, social, environmental factors) into modelling of land use change and decision support systems to the provision of ecosystem services (Groeneveld et al., 2017). In the context of the BIOCONSENT project, behaviour is defined as being forest management practices opted to be implemented by the forest owners and conservation managers. Within the project, the factors that shape forest management decision making will be covered by the analysis of behaviour of forest owners and conservation managers, as they act as primary agents of change by making and implementing management decisions. The BIOCONSENT project, aims to design an effective and integrated decision support tool, supported by more in-depth knowledge that will be gained on (i) analysing policy objectives and identifying implementation instruments (ii) the behavioural responses from agents of change and (iii) the outcomes of forest conservation and restoration measures. To better understand how alternative policies and management actions affect forest biodiversity conservation and restoration, WP3 seeks to integrate biophysical, social, economic, and policy/governance aspects into forest modelling tools. WP3 will quantify scenario outcomes on regional and EU levels, by interpreting and upscaling policy and management scenarios
Expert Workshop on Digitalisation Narratives and Climate Change Mitigation: Synthesis Report
Get PDF35 scientists and industry representatives gathered at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) outside Vienna in Austria on May 13-14, 2024, to build understanding of how both current and future trajectories of digital transformation impact emission-reduction efforts. This expert workshop on “Digitalisation Narratives and Climate Change Mitigation” was motivated by the weak explicit consideration of digitalisation in future scenarios and modelling assessments used to inform global climate policy.
Participants explored the impacts of digitalisation on energy, materials, firms, markets, lifestyles, and society, and what these impacts mean for greenhouse gas emissions. Workshop activities and insights in this report are organised in three parts: digitalisation impact pathways; future narratives for digitalisation; and digitalisation in the SSP scenario framework used in climate change analysis.
In sum, this synthesis report: (i) maps out the complexity and pervasiveness of digitalisation impacts across society and the economy; (ii) demonstrates how digitalisation is a double-edged sword with both positive and negative effects on jobs, on sustainable growth, and on user engagement and empowerment; (iii) counters a naïve perception that rapid digital transformation is necessarily aligned with climate goals; (iv) shows how firm and household-level digitalisation impacts have wider systemic consequences; (v) identifies common areas of understanding including on the importance of tackling the digital divide, fast paced AI developments, and societal risks from misinformation; (vi) exposes fault lines in expert opinion on the need for broad vs. narrow digital governance
The hours matter: comparing indicators of US residential cooling from hourly versus daily climate variables
Get PDFCooling energy demand in buildings is rapidly increasing as climate warms. Current methods of estimating and predicting residential cooling demand are primarily based on daily temperature, which neglects intraday temperature variations. To determine whether large-scale cooling demand is substantially affected by intraday temperature variations, we conduct a thorough comparison between variable degree days (VDDs) derived from daily temperature data with variable degree hours (VDHs) derived from hourly temperature data during the summer seasons in the United States. The results imply that incorporating intraday variations in temperature will have substantial impacts on cooling estimation and prediction. A comparison of the historical (1990–2014) VDD and VDH calculated from ERA5 temperature data reveals that US summer cooling demand estimated from hourly temperature is 29%–45% higher than those estimated from daily temperature, with differences exceeding 60% when hourly solar radiation is considered. This occurs because the hourly calculations captures the ‘hot hours’ of the mild days. Future scenario analysis, using the NASA Earth Exchange Global Daily Downscaled Projections, indicates that under the medium greenhouse gas emissions pathway (SSP2-45), US summer VDH and VDD are expected to increase by approximately 45% and 100% by the late century (2081–2100). This suggests that, daily-based predictions generally project cooling demand growth at twice the rate of hourly-based predictions, as the daily method accounts for increases in both high and low temperatures regardless of whether they exceed the baseline, while the hourly method, with its finer temporal resolution, includes only temperatures that surpass the baseline. Such effects are seen across most areas of the US. Our analysis underscores the significance of incorporating temperature data at higher temporal resolution in estimating and predicting cooling demand, which is essential for effectively implementing various measures to achieve energy conservation and climate goals
Persistent positive anomalies in geopotential heights drive enhanced wildfire activity across Europe
Get PDFPersistent positive anomalies (PPAs) in 500 hPa geopotential height are upper-air circulation patterns associated with surface heatwaves, drought and fuel aridity. We examined the association between PPA events and surface fire weather and burned area at a pan-European level. Europe-wide, extreme fire weather and wildfires were on average 3.5 and 2.3 times more likely to occur concurrently with a PPA, respectively. PPAs were associated with 45% of pan-European area burned between March and October 2001–2021, and there was a latitudinal increase of up to 63% in the percentage of area burned during or up to 7 days following PPAs over Northern Europe. The burned area was highest up to one week following PPA presence, and fuel moisture indices from the Canadian Fire Weather Index System lagged behind peak PPA strength, demonstrating the role of PPAs in pre-drying fuels. Our findings highlight opportunities for developing early warning systems of wildfire danger, having implications for wildfire awareness and preparedness, informing policy and wildfire management decisions like early mobilization and resource sharing initiatives across Europe.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Novel fire regimes under climate changes and human influences: impacts, ecosystem responses and feedbacks’
Engaging and Conflict-Resolution preference elicitation in Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for Localized Mitigation Actions in Disaster Risk Management
Get PDFAchieving long-term effectiveness in natural disaster risk management needs a multifaceted approach. This approach should integrate the disaster’s impact with the region's social, economic, and physical characteristics. A variety of models have been developed to measure the disaster’s impact and propose risk reduction solutions. However, finding the optimal local solution is challenging. To enhance the sustainability of these solutions, it is crucial to consider the local pressing issues, which may be social, economic, cultural, or physical in nature. These issues manifest in the decision criteria when determining the most appropriate risk mitigation or management strategies. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods are instrumental in evaluating suitable solutions by integrating the outputs of risk assessment models with local priorities, which are represented as rankings of the decision criteria. Since the local experts and community representatives have the most practical information regarding regional issues, their input is essential in ranking the decision criteria. Various preference elicitation methods can be employed to capture experts’ perceptions on important issues.
When it comes to disaster risk mitigation and management, the elicitation of stakeholders’ collective perception on important issues is challenging. Different experts with different backgrounds, concerns, and visions for the future can have different perceptions on important issues that should be addressed by the disaster risk mitigation solution. This difference of opinion can lead to conflict of priorities. Since the disaster risk mitigation and management solutions are usually led to policy making or implementation of those solutions, the existing conflicts can have a negative impact on the effectiveness of these solutions. As such, it is vital to address these conflicts and elicit the collective priorities of local stakeholders.
In this research, a Simos-based silent negotiation process is developed for eliciting the stakeholders’ collective priorities for natural disaster risk mitigation and management. The developed process is designed to engage the representatives of local communities and other experts and decision-makers and systematically direct them to compromise on less important issues. The designed process benefits from different methods to increase robustness. By directing participants to compromise on their less important issues, this process provides the collective local priorities in mitigating disaster risk. Furthermore, it can gauge the level of conflicts among the stakeholders at the end of the silent negotiation. Additionally, it creates equal opportunity for all the participants to raise concerns and argue their point of view. This creates the opportunity to address issues and concerns from different communities.
The process is developed and implemented in the Horizon Europe project MEDiate (Multi-hazard and risk-informed system for Enhanced local and regional Disaster risk management). The MEDiate project is dedicated to creating a decision-support system (DSS) for disaster risk management that considers the complexities of multiple interacting natural hazards and fits the final disaster risk management solution to the characteristics, priorities, and concerns of the local communities and decision-makers. The MEDiate framework is implemented on four different testbeds (Oslo (Norway), Nice (France), Essex (UK), and Múlaþing (Iceland)), each of which has a different multi-hazard pair and different socio-economic characteristics