Models for supporting climate adaptation and mitigation planning, mostly in the form of Integrated Assessment Models, are poorly equipped for aiding questions related to fairness of adaptation and mitigation strategies, because they often disregard distributional outcomes. When evaluating policies using such models, the costs and benefits are typically aggregated across all actors in the system, and over the entire planning horizon. While a policy may be beneficial when considering the aggregate outcome, it can be harmful to some people, somewhere, at some point in time. The practice of aggregating over all actors and over time thus gives rise to problems of justice; it could also exacerbate existing injustices. While the literature discusses some of these injustices in ad-hoc and case specific manner, a systematic approach for considering distributive justice in model-based climate change planning is lacking. This study aims to fill this gap by proposing 11 requirements that an Integrated Assessment Model should meet in order to enable the assessment of distributive justice in climate mitigation and adaptation policies. We derive the requirements from various ethical imperatives stemming from the theory of distributive justice. More specifically, we consider both intra-generational (among people within one generation) and intergenerational (between generations) distributive justice. We investigate to what extent the 11 requirements are being met in recent model-based climate planning studies, and highlight several directions for future research to advance the accounting for distributive justice in model-based support for climate change planning. This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics g Climate Change and Global Justice.

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Enabling assessment of distributive justice through models for climate change planning: A review of recent advances and a research agenda

While urban areas are being threatened by water shortage due to climate change and rapid population growth, effects of urban development patterns on future municipal water shortage are rarely investigated. We address this aspect of urbanization by assessing the impacts of sprawl versus high-density patterns on future changes in the sub-annual water shortage intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) relationships. The City of Fort Collins, Colorado, water supply system is chosen as a representative region that is rapidly developing over the last decades. The future water supply is estimated using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) driven with a hot-dry climate model from the statistically downscaled Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 5 (CMIP5) projections. Future water demand is projected using the Integrated Urban Water Model (IUWM) under both sprawl and high-density development patterns. The demonstration study reveals that urban areas under the sprawl development pattern are likely to experience water shortage events with higher intensity, duration, and frequency compared to the high-density pattern. Characterizing impacts of urban development patterns on future water shortage conditions is required for sustainable water management and smart urban growth and can help urban planners and water managers to develop an adaptive path to meet future water demand and decrease the vulnerability of municipal water supply systems to shortage.

Effects of Urban Development Patterns on Municipal Water Shortage

Assessing Adaptive Irrigation Impacts on Water Scarcity in Nonstationary Environments—A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

In my PhD thesis, I explore what can be considered a sustainable energy system on a global scale and what methods and tools can help sustainable energy policy design and assessment. Energy system modelling and sustainable energy system narratives are the two main areas of interest of this thesis. I started my PhD with exploring the current energy systems modelling practice as well as social science contribution in the sustainable energy research. I discovered several main research gaps related to the topic of this thesis: (1) Most of existing energy system models have unrealistic or oversimplified assumptions that can negatively impact the quality of the models’ outputs and consequently the quality of decision-making informed by such models; (2) There is a limited instrumental value of the available theories related to a sustainable energy system development; (3) There is a lack of global energy system narratives that would have a holistic understanding of the long-term energy system purposes (goals) and the principles of the energy system sustainable design. This thesis has become an attempt to close the identified research gaps in order to answer the main research questions. System dynamics, steady-state economy and energy justice theory are the main methodological and conceptual components of the thesis’ research design. The main results of my research are: (1) The list of questions defining the current energy paradigm which can be used as a guidance for a sustainable energy system modelling; (2) The developed steady state of energy concept implying that energy sufficiency should be a universal energy system goal in the context of a long-term energy system sustainability; (2) The list of requirements for a socially sustainable energy provision based on the energy justice principles which can be used as guidelines for a sustainable energy policy assessment and design; (3) The system dynamics model of electricity access provision in Sub-Saharan Africa which demonstrates an example of how energy system modelling can be combined with sustainable energy system narratives for addressing methodological and disciplinary gaps in the energy system research and for contributing to better sustainable energy system policy design and assessment.

Connecting Energy System modelling with Sustainable Energy System Narratives at a Global Scale

This study uses qualitative research methods of text mining to elucidate the potential and prospects for community-based learning opportunities for raising environmental awareness and bringing about healthy behaviour change among university students and local residents. In particular, we focus on the importance of community-based learning in raising environmental awareness and inspiring action to support healthy living and harmony with nature. The three groups were triangulated using semi-structured questionnaires to model the ways in which education for sustainable development (ESD) can contribute to the promotion of environmental education in local communities. In order to collect in-depth data, the authors themselves were present at the study sites and collected textual data based on semi-structured questionnaires in a participatory observation framework, where they had a common experience to understand the observations. Analysis was carried out using NVivo12. The two community learning initiatives studied were in Okayama and Tokyo, which are leading ESD policy areas. The two case studies are both university student-led projects that aim to raise environmental awareness in local communities through environmentally conscious behaviour change and the creation of a foundation for healthy living. This study focuses on “youth” and “community” among the five priority areas proposed in the 2015 ESD report and discusses the potential and prospects for community learning initiatives and the triggering of the nudge effect on environmentally conscious behaviour change and health behaviours. The results of the textual analysis with triangulation show that, while policymakers and teachers and leaders driving the initiative acknowledge the importance of ESD in a comprehensive way, their attention is more focused on the design of specific projects and curricula. In contrast, university students engaged in ESD activities rated the social education facilities (local community centres, community learning centres) as “lively” and “motivating”. It was found that there are high expectations for “public living rooms”, which are important as a base for learning to promote healthy and sustainable communities and environmentally conscious behaviour change.

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A Qualitative Assessment of Community Learning Initiatives for Environmental Awareness and Behaviour Change: Applying UNESCO Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Framework

Integrated assessmentmodels (IAMs) are commonly used by decisionmakers in order to derive climate policies. IAMs are currently based on climate‐economics interactions, whereas the role of social system has been highlighted to be of prime importance on the implementation of climate policies. Beyond existing IAMs, we argue that it is therefore urgent to increase efforts in the integration of social processes within IAMs. For achieving such a challenge, we present some promising avenues of research based on the social branches of economics. We finally present the potential implications yielded by such social IAMs.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2020EF001573

Grounding Social Foundations for Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change

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Francine Pellaud

Papers

Grounding Social Foundations for Integrated Assessment Models of Climate Change

Environmental education to education for sustainable development: challenges and issues