Developing a robust decision making framework for climate change policy under uncertainty

Project Information

ROBUST POLICY

Grant agreement ID: 703399

DOI

10.3030/703399

Project closed

EC signature date 14 March 2016

Start date 20 September 2016

End date 19 September 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 168 277,20

EU contribution

€ 168 277,20

Coordinated by

FONDAZIONE ENI ENRICO MATTEI
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ROBUST POLICY (Developing a robust decision making framework for climate change policy under uncertainty)

Reporting period: 2016-09-20 to 2018-09-19

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Climate change is affecting different aspects of life on the earth. These impacts are ranging from melting ice sheets and rising sea levels that threaten the coastal communities, to severe droughts and heatwaves that reduce agricultural output and force communities to migrate. Although the climate change is considered the greatest challenge of our generation, there are still many uncertainties about how the climate system works and interacts with other natural and human systems. These uncertainties have undermined our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as the main trigger of climate change and have disrupted the flow of information from the scientific community to policy makers and the general public. As a result, many people perceive climatic changes as anomalies in the environment. Unless the research community provide informed and robust guidelines to policy makers, this will result in inconsistent and ineffective measures that will fail to grabs the scale of climate change as the largest threat to our planet and its habitats. Therefore, the uncertainty in climate change projections can severely affect the ability of our societies to respond and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
This project was designed to address the issue of uncertainty in climate change and provide a scientific approach for how to deal with these uncertainties. In particular, this project considered a holistic approach and tried to incorporate socioeconomic impacts of climate change. Uncertainties in the climate system can be modeled using integrated assessment models (IAM) by incorporating stochastic optimization techniques. In this project, the fellow aimed to address how to deal with uncertainties in the climate and human systems in two distinct ways.
First, a standard IAM model of climate change and economy (DICE model) was modified to accommodate for the new and unconventional technologies that aim to reduce and eliminate the negative impacts of climate change. Geoengineering technologies including Carbon Removal Dioxide and Solar Radiative Management were considered as most prominent candidates. The uncertainty about the efficiency of these technologies were investigated and the impact on optimal mitigation policy was demonstrated.
Second, the impact of climate change on population dynamic and specially on migration was investigated. Based on historical bilateral migration data, a migration probability for each group of high-skilled and low-skilled labor was established. The goal was to develop a modeling framework to account for uncertainties in socioeconomic factors that dominate migration flows and to provide robust decision making tools for analyzing climate change risks and its broader impacts.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

"The project was carried on in four work packages and delivered 3 deliverables in form of published papers. The first working package was concerned with the review of the existing work and study the decision making criteria. This working package included a summary of the latest research in the field of climate change economic modeling. In particular, the study was focused on how mitigation technologies have been modeled in the integrated assessment models of climate change and economy. The results from this work package were published in the form of a working paper (Shayegh, Soheil, Valentina Bosetti, Simon Dietz, Johannes Emmerling, Christoph Hambel, Svenn Jensen, Holger Kraft, Massimo Tavoni, Christian P. Traeger, and Rick Van der Ploeg. ""Recalculating the Social Cost of Carbon."" (2018)).

In the second working package the fellow demonstrated the avenues where uncertainties in calculating the social cost of carbon has overshadowed the significance of climate policy making and has led to divergence in policy recommendations from climate change economic modeling community. This led to the development of a new framework for studying uncertainties and designing robust climate policies. The framework was tested in the context of modeling carbon dioxide removal technologies and the results were tested under different policy preferences and decision criteria.

The third work package was devoted to developing a framework for studying risk and uncertainty and developing a robust policy. Different methodologies were used and the results were shown to be robust against a variety of uncertainties in the model. At the end of this work package too, a paper was developed to demonstrate the use of this framework in modeling climate change consequences of outgassing from the oceans (Manoussi, Vassiliki, Soheil Shayegh, and Massimo Tavoni. ""Optimal Carbon Dioxide Removal in Face of Ocean Carbon Sink Feedback."" (2017)).

Finally, the last work package was developed to generate new set of robust climate policies. The framework was also tested in the model of climate change-induced migration and the results were demonstrated to be significantly robust. The case of climate induced migration was studied under this work package and migration policies for future scenarios of climate change were developed (Shayegh, Soheil, and Gregory Casey. ""To Go or not to Go: Migration Alleviates Climate Damages even for Those Who Stay Behind."" (2017)).

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Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The state of the art research on migration and the socioeconomic drivers of that has already helped shaping some part of the debate in this field. I contributed to the preparation of a report by the Marie-Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) on “The Future of European Research Funding”. I helped conducting and analyzing the results of a survey on refugees in higher education in the EU . My research has helped shaping the debate around the issue of migration, climate change, and higher education policies within the EU.

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