Integrating climate change mitigation and adaptation: Refining theory for a mathematical framework to quantify private and public cost-effectiveness, and C emissions for energy and development projects

Abstract

This work builds on a bottom-up market greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation approach to determine the mitigation potential of specific activities by introducing two new concepts: the “adaptation potential” (defined as the difference between the sum of costs and benefits of adaptation, over a specified interval), and; “no behest” opportunities (defined as when the benefits of an activity equal or exceed both the costs to the private investor and the society, excluding the benefits of avoided climate change). “No behest” activities are contrasted with “no regrets” opportunities, whose benefits are equal to, or exceed costs to society, excluding the benefits of avoided climate change. The word “behest” conveys the value of requiring little further incentive or regulation to motivate private investors to take advantage of existing economic opportunities. Therefore, “no behest” opportunities are similar to “no regrets” opportunities, but with a greater relevance to private investments that both mitigate and adapt by including the real market benefits and costs of cleaner development options. This work utilises several mathematical methods to remove information asymmetries between market decision-making and what is both economically and environmentally efficient. These methods can be used for both contextually based bottom-up and top-down scenarios in either an adaptation and mitigation framework. The outputs are a quantified change in profitability and parallel GHG emissions of specific activity baselines that are suitable for carbon (C) liability assessment, investment and government emission targets in the current and projected policy environments. These methods can also be used to determine “no behest” activities which have lower private barriers to implementation than “no regrets” activities.