1,721,228 research outputs found
Climatic change: CD-Links special issue on national low-carbon development pathways
Full text linkOne hundred and ninety-three governments adopted the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2015. The agreement foresees, for the near term, a new bottom-up process where countries pledge so-called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025–2030. At the same time, the Paris Agreement defines the longterm objective to hold temperature change to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it further to 1.5 °C. The consistency between the NDCs and the long-term temperature goals is planned to be regularly assessed in global stocktaking exercises as part of the international negotiations. At the same time, countries have also committed themselves to implement a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in order to eradicate poverty, protect the global environment and spur inclusive economic development. Within this context, the CD-LINKS project (www.cd-links.org) brought together an international team of researchers with global, national and sectoral expertise to explore possible linkages between national and global pathways consistent with the overall objective of the Paris Agreement and sustainable development. Part of this work is summarised in this special issue in Climatic Change, which contains eleven papers, including this introductory one, presenting the insights from the collaboration between national and global modelling teams and yielding a more coherent and detailed picture of the future than is typical of climate change mitigation pathways studies focusing on the global level only
Lost in translation? Reflections on using principles embedded in global climate policy to interpret climate objectives and assess mitigation pathways
No full textFast zehn Jahre nach dem Pariser Klimaabkommen steigen die weltweiten Emissionen weiter an. Mehrdeutigkeit, sowohl bei den Zielen als auch den Maßnahmen zur Erreichung dieser Ziele, die für das Erreichen einer Einigung von entscheidender Bedeutung war, behindert nun den Fortschritt. Der dadurch entstandene Interpretationsspielraum könnte dazu führen, dass das Endziel der Klimarahmenkonvention der Vereinten Nationen, eine gefährliche anthropogene Störung des Klimasystems zu verhindern, verfehlt wird. Gleichzeitig sind in der Architektur der globalen Klimapolitik eine Reihe wesentlicher Grundsätze verankert, die idealerweise die Auslegung des Übereinkommens von Paris leiten sollten. Pfade Integrierter Bewertungsmodelle, die die Grundlage für die Sachstandsberichte zur Minderung des Klimawandels des Zwischenstaatlichen Ausschusses für Klimaänderungen (IPCC) bilden, wurden heftig kritisiert, weil sie solche grundsätzlichen Überlegungen auslassen. Im ersten Teil dieser Dissertation entwickle ich einen analytischen Ansatz, um die Klimaziele des Übereinkommens von Paris in Minderungspfaden zu operationalisieren. Diesen Ansatz wende ich an, um einflussreiche Szenarien, die keinem Prozess des Peer-Review unterlagen, zu untersuchen, wobei ich den Grundsatz der Schadensvermeidung berücksichtige. Im zweiten Teil widme ich mich Grundsätzen, die von Wissenschaftler:innen und politischen Entscheidungsträger:innen vergleichsweise viel Aufmerksamkeit erhalten haben - den Grundsätzen der Gerechtigkeit und der gemeinsamen, aber unterschiedlichen Verantwortlichkeiten. Ich beurteile, ob (und unter welchen Bedingungen) diese Grundsätze das Erreichen der Klimaziele des Pariser Abkommens und des Grundsatzes der Schadensvermeidung erleichtern. Abschließend konzentriere ich mich auf den globalen und regionalen Einsatz der Kohlendioxidentnahme, der dazu beitragen kann, die Erwärmung langfristig zu verringern.Nearly ten years after the Paris Agreement, global emissions continue to rise. Ambiguities, both in the objectives and the measures to achieve them, which were crucial to facilitate consensus, now plague progress. The interpretive range they provide may result in failure to meet the ultimate objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Simultaneously, the global climate policy architecture has a number of fundamental principles embedded in it, which should ideally guide interpretations of the Paris Agreement. Integrated Assessment Model pathways, which form the bedrock of scientific assessments of climate change mitigation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have been heavily criticized for omitting such principled considerations. In the first part of this dissertation, I develop an analytical approach to operationalize the climate objectives of the Paris Agreement in mitigation pathways and apply this to assess non-peer-reviewed influential scenarios, invoking the principle of harm prevention. In the second part, I focus on principles that have received relatively more attention from scientists and policymakers - the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities. I evaluate whether (and under what conditions) these principles facilitate the achievement of the climate objectives of the Paris Agreement and the principle of harm prevention. Lastly, I focus on the global and regional deployment of carbon dioxide removal to facilitate a long-term drawdown in warming
A special issue on model-based long-term transport scenarios: Model comparison and new methodological developments to improve energy and climate policy analysis
Full text linkImproving poverty and inequality modelling in climate research
Full text linkAs climate change progresses, the risk of adverse impacts on vulnerable populations is growing. As governments seek increased and drastic action, policymakers are likely to seek quantification of climate-change impacts and the consequences of mitigation policies on these populations. Current models used in climate research have a limited ability to represent the poor and vulnerable, or the different dimensions along which they face these risks. Best practices need to be adopted more widely, and new model features that incorporate social heterogeneity and different policy mechanisms need to be developed. Increased collaboration between modellers, economists, and other social scientists could aid these developments.
We review the history and state of the art of models used in climate research, including integrated assessment models (IAMs) and national studies, and those that model mitigation and climate-change impacts. We assess how and to what extent they represent distributional impacts within countries. We argue that there is much scope to improve the representation of income distribution and poverty. Given the diversity of models, this endeavour presents fundamental challenges for some models, but possibly requires only incremental changes in others
A multidimensional feasibility evaluation of low-carbon scenarios
Full text linkLong-term mitigation scenarios developed by integrated assessment models underpin major aspects of recent IPCC reports and have been critical to identify the system transformations that are required to meet stringent climate goals. However, they have been criticized for proposing pathways that may prove challenging to implement in the real world and for failing to capture the social and institutional challenges of the transition. There is a growing interest to assess the feasibility of these scenarios, but past research has mostly focused on theoretical considerations. This paper proposes a novel and versatile multidimensional framework that allows evaluating and comparing decarbonization pathways by systematically quantifying feasibility concerns across geophysical, technological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional dimensions. This framework enables to assess the timing, disruptiveness and scale of feasibility concerns, and to identify trade-offs across different feasibility dimensions. As a first implementation of the proposed framework, we map the feasibility concerns of the IPCC 1.5 °C Special Report scenarios. We select 24 quantitative indicators and propose feasibility thresholds based on insights from an extensive analysis of the literature and empirical data. Our framework is, however, flexible and allows evaluations based on different thresholds or aggregation rules. Our analyses show that institutional constraints, which are often not accounted for in scenarios, are key drivers of feasibility concerns. Moreover, we identify a clear intertemporal trade-off, with early mitigation being more disruptive but preventing higher and persistent feasibility concerns produced by postponed mitigation action later in the century
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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