Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ROBUST POLICY (Developing a robust decision making framework for climate change policy under uncertainty)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2016-09-20 al 2018-09-19
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.
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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