Abstract
Mitigating climate change and ensuring regional equity development is equitable are matters of global concern. Systematic and in-depth research into these issues is seldom conducted. In this research we combine qualitative and quantitative studies and use six state-of-the-art energy-economy analysis models and four long term scenarios to explore the distribution of regional contributions for climate change mitigation in the future. We focus on the energy investment gap and policy cost. The study’s conclusion is that, under the assumption of carbon tax as a source of energy investment from 2025, the global positive energy investment gap in the climate change mitigation scenario will not appear until around 2035–2040. Asia and OECD90+EU (Countries from the OECD 1990, EU and its candidates) are the regions that will have a significant direct impact on the global energy investment gap under climate policies in the future. However, from the perspective of the relative value (the percentage of the energy investment gap relative to the energy investment in the Current Policies (CPol) scenario), Asia will contribute the most to the global energy investment gap under the climate stability policies. Under the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) scenario, Asia will contribute the most in the near term and REF will contribute the most in the medium term. The findings show that OECD90+EU will bear more cost in the pledges scenario, and Asia will bear more cost in the climate stability scenarios in the medium term. Contrary to the common sense expectation, the developed regions will contribute the least in terms of the proportion of the policy cost to the respective economic aggregates under the climate stability scenarios in the medium and long term, but the opposite is true in the developing regions. By and large, from the perspective of the current climate change mitigation policies, the developed regions and developing regions will achieve a win-win situation in the long run, but the relative contribution of the developed regions is not as great as was previously expected. These novel findings should prove to be useful to policy makers when developing transition strategies for climate change mitigation.
Highlights
Climate change mitigation and equitable development are among the most important and complex challenges that humanity is facing today [1,2,3]
Carbon tax, which is a levy on fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide and can be paid either by the producers or consumers of fossil fuels, has always been seen as an important policy tool for controlling carbon emissions and for climate change mitigation [13]
The existing studies agree on the significant investment gap between climate policy and the “business as usual” projections [19], but due to limitations on the availability of the region-level energy investment and carbon price across multiple scenarios, no previous analysis has considered the impact of a carbon tax on the future energy investment gap in various regions
Summary
Climate change mitigation and equitable development are among the most important and complex challenges that humanity is facing today [1,2,3]. Several international agreements have been established to address this global climate change mitigation cooperation; these include the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) [7], the Kyoto Protocol [8] and its Doha Amendment [9], the Copenhagen Accord [10], the Cancun Agreements [11], and the Paris Agreement [12]. These international agreements have stated action measures and targets for climate change mitigation, some crucial issues remain unresolved, the question of under what conditions and when, developed regions need to provide financial assistance to developing regions, and what changes in their respective policy costs will occur. Few studies have focused on work sharing in a multi-model integration environment and assessed the contribution to climate change mitigation across the major economies
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