'Paris rules' will drive global climate progress

Significance COP22 has been dubbed "the COP of action, adaptation and Africa". It is a key opportunity to build confidence in the system of global cooperation adopted at the Paris Climate Conference. The Paris meeting ushered in a new framework for cooperation on climate change based on voluntary emissions reductions targets that will be jointly reviewed every five years. Negotiators gathering in Marrakech for COP22 face the task of making the Paris Agreement work -- and delivering results on a sufficiently large scale. Impacts Cooperation under the Paris framework will help reduce climate change effects, though overshooting of the 2 degree target is inevitable. The Paris deal's reliance on peer pressure and self-policing will risk national-level backsliding during the implementation process. Actions taken in the next ten years will determine the impact of climate change on global growth prospects for the whole of this century.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kim ◽  
Daniel Partridge ◽  
James Haywood

<p>Global climate model (GCM) ensembles still produce a significant spread of estimates for the future of climate change which hinders our ability to influence policymakers. The range of these estimates can only partly be explained by structural differences and varying choice of parameterisation schemes between GCMs. GCM representation of cloud and aerosol processes, more specifically aerosol microphysical properties, remain a key source of uncertainty contributing to the wide spread of climate change estimates. The radiative effect of aerosol is directly linked to the microphysical properties and these are in turn controlled by aerosol source and sink processes during transport as well as meteorological conditions.</p><p>A Lagrangian, trajectory-based GCM evaluation framework, using spatially and temporally collocated aerosol diagnostics, has been applied to over a dozen GCMs via the AeroCom initiative. This framework is designed to isolate the source and sink processes that occur during the aerosol life cycle in order to improve the understanding of the impact of these processes on the simulated aerosol burden. Measurement station observations linked to reanalysis trajectories are then used to evaluate each GCM with respect to a quasi-observational standard to assess GCM skill. The AeroCom trajectory experiment specifies strict guidelines for modelling groups; all simulations have wind fields nudged to ERA-Interim reanalysis and all simulations use emissions from the same inventories. This ensures that the discrepancies between GCM parameterisations are emphasised and differences due to large scale transport patterns, emissions and other external factors are minimised.</p><p>Preliminary results from the AeroCom trajectory experiment will be presented and discussed, some of which are summarised now. A comparison of GCM aerosol particle number size distributions against observations made by measurement stations in different environments will be shown, highlighting the difficulties that GCMs have at reproducing observed aerosol concentrations across all size ranges in pristine environments. The impact of precipitation during transport on aerosol microphysical properties in each GCM will be shown and the implications this has on resulting aerosol forcing estimates will be discussed. Results demonstrating the trajectory collocation framework will highlight its ability to give more accurate estimates of the key aerosol sources in GCMs and the importance of these sources in influencing modelled aerosol-cloud effects. In summary, it will be shown that this analysis approach enables us to better understand the drivers behind inter-model and model-observation discrepancies.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (6) ◽  
pp. 1524-1542
Author(s):  
Melissa A Haltuch ◽  
Z Teresa A’mar ◽  
Nicholas A Bond ◽  
Juan L Valero

Abstract US West Coast sablefish are economically valuable, with landings of 11.8 million pounds valued at over $31 million during 2016, making assessing and understanding the impact of climate change on the California Current (CC) stock a priority for (1) forecasting future stock productivity, and (2) testing the robustness of management strategies to climate impacts. Sablefish recruitment is related to large-scale climate forcing indexed by regionally correlated sea level (SL) and zooplankton communities that pelagic young-of-the-year sablefish feed upon. This study forecasts trends in future sablefish productivity using SL from Global Climate Models (GCMs) and explores the robustness of harvest control rules (HCRs) to climate driven changes in recruitment using management strategy evaluation (MSE). Future sablefish recruitment is likely to be similar to historical recruitment but may be less variable. Most GCMs suggest that decadal SL trends result in recruitments persisting at lower levels through about 2040 followed by higher levels that are more favorable for sablefish recruitment through 2060. Although this MSE suggests that spawning biomass and catches will decline, and then stabilize, into the future under both HCRs, the sablefish stock does not fall below the stock size that leads to fishery closures.


2022 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 06003
Author(s):  
Kheda Murtazova ◽  
Salambek Aliyev

The study of the problems of the impact of climate change on economic development has become in recent years one of the main directions of economic research. At the same time, along with the development of a global macroeconomic policy in the field of climate and green building, more and more attention is paid to the analysis of corporate strategies to reduce risks and adapt to the consequences of climate change. Without large-scale business investments in green innovative technologies and the introduction of corporate standards for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is impossible to achieve long-term targets for reducing global climate risks.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesús Fernández ◽  
María Dolores Frías

<p>International model intercomparison initiatives, such as CORDEX or CMIP5, along with several relatively recent projects at international and national level, provide a wealth of model simulations of future regional climate. In a recent work, Fernandez et al (2019) collected 196 different future climate change projections over Spain, considering data from ENSEMBLES, ESCENA, EURO- and Med-CORDEX, along with their driving global climate projections from CMIP3 and CMIP5. This ensemble mixed different multi-model initiatives in an ensemble of opportunity, in the sense that it does not respond to any scientific design beyond the exploration of multi-model uncertainty. This ensemble of opportunity is not only the result of the mixture of different initiatives, but also responds to the lack of a balanced experimental design within most of the initiatives. Many of the initiatives -especially those unfunded, such as CORDEX- are carried out on a voluntary basis, with no strong constraint in the global climate models (GCMs) used as boundary conditions or in the number of contributing members per regional climate model (RCM).</p><p>Fernandez et al (2019) found in this ensemble a strong influence of the driving GCM on the regional climate change signal, along with favored GCMs, selected by many regional climate modelling groups to the detriment of GCMs publishing their output later or not at all. In this work, we quantitatively assess the impact of unbalanced GCM-RCM ensembles. For this purpose, we subsampled the ensemble of opportunity to obtain balanced sets of members according to different “what-if” situations: What if all RCMs had contributed a single member to the ensemble? What if each GCM had been dynamically downscaled only once? What if a given GCM/RCM had not contributed to the ensemble? For each hypothesis, there are a number of alternative sub-ensembles, which are used to evaluate uncertainty.</p><p><strong>Acknowledgement:</strong></p><p>This work is partially funded by the Spanish government through MINECO/FEDER co-funded projects INSIGNIA (CGL2016-79210-R) and MULTI-SDM (CGL2015-66583-R). </p><p><strong>References:</strong></p><p>Fernández, J., et al. (2019) Consistency of climate change projections from multiple global and regional model intercomparison projects. Clim Dyn 52:1139. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4181-8</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (14) ◽  
pp. 4842 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel Meque Uamusse ◽  
Kamshat Tussupova ◽  
Kenneth M Persson

The impact of climate change on the production of hydropower in Mozambique is reviewed and regression analysis is applied to evaluate future climate scenarios. The results show that climate change will cause increased variability of precipitation and create flooding that can damage infrastructure such as hydropower dams. Climate change can also cause drought that will decrease surface water and reduce hydroelectric generation in Mozambique. Electricity generation is to a major extent performed through large-scale hydropower in Mozambique. To fulfill the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and an increased demand for electricity, several large and many small hydropower projects are planned and were built in the country. The economic lifetime of a hydropower plant is typically 100 years, meaning that the hydrologic regimes for the plants should be evaluated for at least this period. Climate change effects are rarely included in present feasibility studies. Economic implications associated with climate change phenomena are higher in Mozambique than in neighboring countries as its future electricity demand to a large extent is forecasted to be met by hydropower. The large hydropower potential in Mozambique should as well be considered when investing in new power plants in southern Africa.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 270-284
Author(s):  
Walaa Mahrous

Purpose This study aims to analyze the impact of global climate change on food security in the East African Community (EAC) region, using panel data analysis for five countries, over 2000-2014. Design/methodology/approach The determinants of food security are expressed as a function of rainfall, temperature, land area under cereal production, and population size. The paper used pooled fixed effects to estimate the relationship among these variables. Findings Findings show that food security in EAC is adversely affected by temperature. However, precipitation and increasing areas cultivated with cereal crops will be beneficial to ensure everyone's food security. Originality/value Actions for mitigating global warming are important for EAC to consolidate the region’s economic, political and social development/stability.


Author(s):  
Jing Fu ◽  
Shaozhong Kang ◽  
Lu Zhang ◽  
Xiaolin Li ◽  
Pierre Gentine ◽  
...  

Abstract Large-scale agricultural activities can exacerbate global climate change. In the past three decades, over 5 Mha of cultivated land have been equipped with Water-Saving Techniques (WST) in Northwest China to cope with water scarcity. However, the effect of WST on local climate and its mechanisms are not yet understood. Here we quantified the local climatic effect by comparing temperature and humidity at controlled and irrigated sites before and after the large-scale implementation of WST. Results show that the substantial reduction in irrigation water use has led to an average increase of 0.3°C in growing-season temperature and reduced relative humidity by 2%. Near-surface air temperature responds nonlinearly to percentage area of WST and a threshold value of 40% is found before any noticeable warming effect over the study area. Moreover, it is found that regions with relatively humid climates respond more significantly to WST. This study reveals the mechanism of WST on near-surface climate and highlights the importance of incorporating this feedback into sustainable water management and land-surface models for assessing the impact of irrigated agriculture on regional climate change.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 1247
Author(s):  
Dan Thorman ◽  
Lorraine Whitmarsh ◽  
Christina Demski

Tackling over-consumption of resources and associated emissions at the lifestyle level will be crucial to climate change mitigation. Understanding the public acceptability of policy aimed at behaviour change in this domain will help to focus strategy towards effective and targeted solutions. Across two studies (n = 259, 300) we consider how policy approaches at different levels of governance (individual, community, and national) might be influenced by the inducement of hypocrisy and the activation of social norms. We also examine the influence of these experimental manipulations upon behavioural intention to reduce consumption (e.g., repair not replace, avoiding luxuries). Dynamic social norm framing was unsuccessful in producing an effect on policy acceptance or intentions to reduce consumption. Information provision about the impact of individual consumption on global climate change increased support for radical policies at the national level (banning environmentally harmful consumption practices) and the community level (working fewer hours, sharing material products, collaborative food cultivation), yet the inducement of hypocrisy had no additional effect. This is in contrast to individual-level behavioural intentions, where the inducement of hypocrisy decreased intentions to engage in high-consumption behaviour. This paper concludes with implications for low-consumption governance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre André Buigues

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the economic and political conditions that could explain why the governments in developed economies have intervened in the automobile industry. The author identifies the main reasons and the shortcomings of these public interventions. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents different forms of public intervention in the automobile industry of various countries over the past few decades: infant industry, research and development (R&D), global climate change and global systemic crisis. Findings The automobile sector is viewed by governments as a key sector and is subsidised for different reasons at different periods. The paper shows that governments give different reasons for public intervention in the automobile industry (infant industry, global climate change, R&D externalities, the global financial crisis, etc.). Whatever the theory, in practice, public interventions have a strong impact on the industry and its evolution. Practical implications The paper highlights the importance for car manufacturers of monitoring the political initiatives of public authorities, which can affect the technological evolution of the automobile industry. Social implications For households, the purchase of a car is quite important, and the political orientation of public subsidies in favour of one option over another, such as electric vehicles or an autonomous car, affects their choice. Originality/value The paper examines an issue which has not previously been addressed by journals, yet which is crucial, i.e. the impact of government decisions on the evolution of an industry. The approach can also be applied to other sectors.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nilupa Udawatta ◽  
Jian Zuo ◽  
Keri Chiveralls ◽  
George Zillante

PurposeThere is an increasing level of recognition of the pressing issues associated with climate change and resource depletion. As a result, it is well recognised that higher education institutions bear responsibilities to promote “sustainable development”. Many universities have adopted green building practices in the construction of their building infrastructure. A variety of Green Building Rating Tools (GBRTs) have been designed to facilitate green building developments. Thus, the aim of this research is to identify mechanisms to improve current GBRTs in terms of waste management (WM) practices by using green star accredited educational buildings in Australia.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach was adopted in this study to achieve the research aim by conducting three case studies of educational buildings in South Australia. Thirty three interviews were carried out in a face-to-face, semi-structured manner and project documentations were reviewed. The participants were asked to provide their expert opinions on the GS initiative and its ability to minimise waste generation, the impact of the GS initiative on solid WM practices and problems associated with the implementation process of the GS initiative. Data was analysed using code-based content analysis using the NVivo software package. Tables and figures were used as the visualization technique to present an expedient understanding in a holistic manner.FindingsFindings showed that the Green Star (GS) initiative drives change in the way current practices are performed in the Australian construction industry. However, this study revealed that WM targets outlined in the GS initiative are not challenging enough. Thus, suggestions are provided in this research to improve the WM aspects of GS initiatives by looking beyond a focus on “sustainability” and “waste minimisation” towards a focus on regenerative environments.Originality/valueThese findings are valuable for practitioners and policymakers seeking to improve WM practices and to address issues associated with climate change and resource depletion.


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