Analyzing climate change impacts on health, energy, water resources, and biodiversity sectors for effective climate change policy in South Korea

This study analyzes how climate change affects the economy, society, and environment in South Korea. Then, the study explores the ways to strengthen capabilities that can alleviate climate change impacts. To find them, the study employs a system dynamics simulation method and builds a model with several sectors including the urban, rural, population, and social-environmental sectors. The study compares the size of climate change damages in rural and urban areas. The results with representative concentration path (RCP) 8.5 show that the size of climate change damage will continue to increase by 2050. The projected damages from the reduced industrial outputs in urban areas will be larger than that in rural areas. The results also show that the service sector will face stronger impacts from climate change than the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. However, the total size of damage in the rural areas will be bigger than that of the urban areas. It is because the size of reduced industrial outputs per capita in the rural areas is twice bigger than that of the urban areas. The climate change damage in the social and environmental sectors (including a loss of biodiversity and an increase in health costs) account for the largest part of the total damage. The study finally provides suggestions and policies that can improve the capabilities to reduce the climate change damages. One of the major suggestions of this study is that the increase in the climate change budget corresponding to the GDP growth can minimize the size of climate change impacts.

A Framework for Compensating Climate Change Damages

Anthropogenic climate change is expected to contribute to mass migration from many different regions. Heyward and Ödalen (2016) propose a tailor-made migration option for victims of total territorial loss: a Free Movement Passport for the Territorially Dispossessed (PTD). The PTD presents a significant advancement over standard proposals for individual migration in response to total territorial loss. However, I argue that the compensatory obligations of states are more restrictive than the PTD scheme assumes (sec. 5), and that the contents of the right to compensation of the territorially dispossessed are not as far-reaching as required by it (sec. 6). In response to these difficulties, I argue that its purpose is better served by means of collective migration and propose a Passport for Territorially Dispossessed Collectives, which is also well positioned to serve as a framework for compensating a range of other climate-change related losses (sec. 9).

Embedding Preference Uncertainty for Environmental Amenities in Climate Change Economic Assessments: A “Random” Step Forward

While there is a considerable debate regarding the choice of proper discount rates for assessing climate change projects and policies, only a tiny body of literature emphasizes “what to discount”. Usually, climate change economic assessments rely on tools and methods that employ strong simplifications, assuming, among others, given and fixed preferences about the values of man-made and environmental goods. Aiming to fill a gap in the literature, this paper leaves aside the issue of discounting and focuses on the nature and impact of preference uncertainty on the economic estimates of future climate change damages on ecosystem non-market goods and services. To this end, a general random walk-based stochastic model is proposed, combining a number of parameters, e.g., the growth of income, depletion of environmental assets, the elasticity of income and demand, and the change in preferences towards the environment. The illustrative application of the model shows that the value of environmental losses is significantly affected by the change in preferences. By doing so, the model allows the analyst to visualize future paths of preference evolutions and to bring future values of damaged environmental assets realistically to the fore. If these elements are neglected when estimating climate change-related future damages to environmental goods and services, the results may be too narrow from a policy perspective.

The economically optimal warming limit of the planet

Both climate-change damages and climate-change mitigation will incur economic costs. While the risk of severe damages increases with the level of global warming (Allen et al., 2018; Dell et al., 2014; IPCC, 2014b; Lenton et al., 2008), mitigating costs increase steeply with more stringent warming limits (Allen et al., 2018; IPCC, 2014a; Rogelj et al., 2015). Here we show that the global warming limit that minimizes this century's total economic costs of climate change lies between 1.9 and 2 °C if temperature changes continue to impact national economic growth rates as observed in the past. The result is robust across a wide range of normative assumptions on the valuation of future welfare and inequality aversion. For our study we estimated climate change impacts on economic growth for 186 countries based on recent empirical insights (Burke et al., 2015a), and mitigation costs using a state-of-the-art energy-economy-climate model with a wide range of highly-resolved mitigation options. Our purely economic assessment, even though it omits non-monetary damages, provides support for the international Paris Agreement on climate change. The political goal of limiting global warming to “well below 2 degrees” is thus also an economically optimal goal.

UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL COST OF CARBON: A MODEL DIAGNOSTIC AND INTER-COMPARISON STUDY

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a monetary estimate of global climate change damages to society from an additional unit of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. SCCs are used to estimate the benefits of CO2 reductions from policies. However, little is known about the modeling underlying the values or the implied societal risks, making SCC estimates difficult to interpret and assess. This study performs the first in-depth examination of SCC modeling using controlled diagnostic experiments that yield detailed intermediate results, allow for direct comparison of individual components of the models, and facilitate evaluation of the individual model SCCs. Specifically, we analyze DICE, FUND, and PAGE and the multimodel approach used by the US Government. Through our component assessments, we trace SCC differences back to intermediate variables and specific features. We find significant variation in component-level behavior between models driven by model-specific structural and implementation elements, some resulting in artificial differences in results. These elements combine to produce model-specific tendencies in climate and damage responses that contribute to differences observed in SCC outcomes — producing PAGE SCC distributions with longer and fatter right tails and higher averages, followed by DICE with more compact distributions and lower averages, and FUND with distributions that include net benefits and the lowest averages. Overall, our analyses reveal fundamental model behavior relevant to many disciplines of climate research, and identify issues with the models, as well as the overall multimodel approach, that need further consideration. With the growing prominence of SCCs in decision-making, ranging from the local-level to international, improved transparency and technical understanding is essential for informed decisions.

Climate Change and Damages

This chapter explores the legal understanding of climate change damages in public international law. It shows that international law has been dealing with transboundary damages since its inception. Damages, whether material or immaterial, have been subject to many inter-state disputes presided upon by international courts and tribunals. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change established the Warsaw international mechanism for loss and damage to address loss and damage associated with impacts of climate change, including extreme events and slow onset events, in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, under the Cancún Adaptation Framework. The Warsaw international mechanism is also tasked with the promotion and the implementation of approaches addressing loss and damage associated with those adverse effects. The chapter also describes the growing trend of states who suffer from climate change seeking remedy from other states for their losses.