The nexus of COVID-19 and climate change has so far brought attention to short-term greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, public health responses, and clean recovery stimulus packages. We take a more holistic approach, making five broad comparisons between the crises with five associated lessons for climate change mitigation policy. First, delay is costly. Second, policy design must overcome biases to human judgment. Third, inequality can be exacerbated without timely action. Fourth, global problems require multiple forms of international cooperation. Fifth, transparency of normative positions is needed to navigate value judgments at the science-policy interface. Learning from policy challenges during the COVID-19 crisis could enhance efforts to reduce GHG emissions and prepare humanity for future crises.

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Five Lessons from COVID-19 for Advancing Climate Change Mitigation.

Barriers and risks of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) adoption in cities: A systematic review of the literature

South Asia is one of the most densely populated regions in the world. With 5% of the global agricultural land, South Asian farmers have to feed over 20% of the global population. South Asia is also one of the poorest regions in the word with about one-third of the world's poor living in this region. Climate change has become a pressing issue in south Asia ravaging agriculture and threatening food security. Climate change is affecting the fundamental basis of agriculture through changes in temperature, rainfall and weather, and by intensifying the occurrences of floods, droughts and heat stress. Like climate change, a pandemic is a global risk. The novel Corona virus (COVID-19) has further disrupted many activities in agriculture and supply chains in South Asia, further compounding the challenges of food and nutrition security and sustaining livelihoods. South Asian farmers are now facing double challenges of addressing the impacts of changing climate and managing the disruption arising from the Covid-19 pandemic. The unprecedented challenge posed by the COVID-19 requires very urgent and decisive actions to ensure food and nutrition security and save people's lives and livelihoods. Regional and global cooperation are also necessary to address the ripple effects of COVID-19 and climate change. South Asian countries must act collectively to share experiences and improve the disrupted agriculture supply chain. Strategies and approaches are needed to address both the coronavirus and climate crises. Currently, there is a unique opportunity to use the disruptive forces of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated recovery policies to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable and resilient food systems. Some of the short-term support to address COVID-19 challenges can be linked to long-term sustainable food production by investing in natural capital to improve long-term productivity and resilience.

Twin Challenges of COVID-19 Pandemic and Climate Change for Agriculture and Food Security in South Asia

The typologies of power: Energy utility business models in an increasingly renewable sector

Growing self-generation and storage are expected to cause significant changes in residential electricity utilization patterns. Commonly applied volumetric network tariffs may induce imbalance between different groups of households and their respective contribution to recovering the operating costs of the grid. Understanding consumer behaviour and appliance usage together with socio-economic factors can help regulatory authorities to adapt network tariffs to new circumstances in a fair way. Here, we assess the effects of 11 network tariff scenarios on household budgets using real load profiles from 765 households. Thus we explore the possibly disruptive impact of applying peak-load-based tariffs on the budgets of households when they have been mainly charged for consumed volumes before. Our analysis estimates the change in household network expenditure for different combinations of energy, peak and fixed charges, and can help to design tariffs that recover the costs needed for the sustainable operation of the grid. Home energy generation and storage are expected to alter residential energy usage. Careful tariff design is thus needed to ensure fair distribution of grid operation costs. Using smart-meter data and socio-economic profiles, this study explores the potential impact of different tariffs on household expenditure.

Exploring the impact of network tariffs on household electricity expenditures using load profiles and socio-economic characteristics

The growing penetration of distributed energy generation (DEG) is causing major changes in the electricity market. One key concern is that existing tariffs incentivize ‘free riding’ behavior by households, leading to a cycle of rising electricity prices and DEG adoption, thereby eroding utility revenues and start a death spiral. We developed an agent based model using data from two cities in the U.S. to explore this issue. Our model shows worries about a utility ‘death spiral’ due to the adoption of rooftop solar, under current policies and prices in the U.S., are unfounded. We found, consistently for a number of scenarios, that, while the residential segment is impacted more heavily than the non-residential segment, the scale of PV penetration is minimal, in terms of overall demand reduction and subsequent tariff increases. Also, the rate of adoption would probably be smooth rather than sudden, giving the physical grid, the utility companies, and government policies enough time to adapt. Although our results suggest that fears of a utility death spiral from solar systems are premature, regulators should still monitor revenue losses and the distribution of losses from all forms of DEG. The concerns should lead to a more focus on tariff innovations.

Can adoption of rooftop solar panels trigger a utility death spiral? A tale of two U.S. cities

In this paper, we examine the similarities and the differences between two global problems, the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, and the extent to which the experience with the COVID-19 pandemic can be of use for tackling climate change. We show that both problems share the same microeconomic foundations, involving an overprovision of a global public bad. In addition, they entail externalities whose correction comes at very high economic and social costs. We leverage on a well-established problem such as climate change that has been studied for several years now, to highlight the common traits with the COVID-19 pandemic, but also important differences. The COVID-19 crisis is itself a reality check for climate policy, international governance and prevention in general. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic is a mock laboratory of climate change, where the time scale of unfolding events is reduced from decades to days. While the former is often measured in days, weeks, months, years, the latter is measured in years, decades, and centuries.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/20/8560/pdf

Rolando Fuentes

Papers

Can adoption of rooftop solar panels trigger a utility death spiral? A tale of two U.S. cities

COVID-19 and Climate Change: A Tale of Two Global Problems

On some economic principles of the energy transition

From vertical to horizontal unbundling: A downstream electricity reliability insurance business model

Using insurance to manage reliability in the distributed electricity sector: Insights from an agent-based model