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The Global Economic Cost of the Paris Climate Agreement

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sustainability and Applications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2019) | Viewed by 5297

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Environmental Science and Policy, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Celoria 2, Milano, Italy
Interests: environment and growth, green growth, economics of climate change, energy modeling, energy sources, investment, productivity, factor demands, innovation and technological change

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The Paris Climate Agreement represents the most ambitious and serious attempt to combat climate change to date. The only other experience has been the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, which has not fared, well possibly due to the limited participation and a top down structure envisaging binding absolute targets on emissions. While the Paris Agreement, with its voluntary and highly heterogeneous pledges, could turn out to be an effective agreement from the point of view of country participation, in its current form it still represents an insufficient effort in preventing global temperature increase by +2 °C. Most relevantly, the economic efficiency of the Agreement made at COP21 is still unclear and the overall economic costs are a topic that as of now is still largely un-assessed and un-researched.

This Special Issue is inviting contributions to an assessment of the overall cost associated with meeting the obligations specified in the NDCs, which are an integral part of the Paris Agreement. Additionally, the interest lies also in evaluating the costs of meeting the +2 °C temperature target under both the case of full participation to the agreement or only partial participation, as exemplified by the withdrawal of the United States under the Trump Administration.

Dr. Marzio Galeotti
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • The overall economic cost of the Paris Climate Agreement
  • The cost of meeting the +2°C temperature target
  • The cost of limited participation to the Paris Agreement
  • The cost of alternative national policies and measures to comply with the Paris Agreement
  • The cost of delay in meeting the Paris Agreement obligations

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

25 pages, 2246 KiB  
Article
Toxic Income as a Trigger of Climate Change
by Fander Falconí, Rafael Burbano, Jesus Ramos-Martin and Pedro Cango
Sustainability 2019, 11(8), 2448; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11082448 - 25 Apr 2019
Cited by 3 | Viewed by 4770
Abstract
The rate of CO2 emissions concentration in the atmosphere increases the likelihood of significant impacts on humankind and ecosystems. The assumption that permissible levels of greenhouse gas emissions cannot exceed the global average temperature increase of 2 °C in relation to pre-industrial [...] Read more.
The rate of CO2 emissions concentration in the atmosphere increases the likelihood of significant impacts on humankind and ecosystems. The assumption that permissible levels of greenhouse gas emissions cannot exceed the global average temperature increase of 2 °C in relation to pre-industrial levels remains uncertain. Despite this uncertainty, the direct implication is that enormous quantities of fossil fuels have, thus far, wrongly been counted as assets by hydrocarbon firms as they cannot be exploited if we want to keep climate under certain control. These are the so-called “toxic assets”. Due to the relationship among CO2 emissions, GDP, energy consumption, and energy efficiency, the concept of toxic assets can be transferred to toxic income, which is the income level that would generate levels of CO2 emissions incompatible with keeping climate change under control. This research, using a simulation model based on country-based econometric models, estimated a threshold for income per capita above which the temperature limit of 2 °C would be surpassed. Under the business as usual scenario, average per capita income would be $14,208 (in constant 2010 USD) in 2033; and under the intervention scenario, which reflects the commitments of the COP21 meeting held in Paris in December 2015, the toxic revenue would be $13,433 (in constant 2010 USD) in 2036. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Global Economic Cost of the Paris Climate Agreement)
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