Abstract
The practice of using climate metrics to estimate carbon dioxide equivalent emissions has long been subject to scientific discussion. One strand of this literature has analysed whether the choice of metric affects the relative cost-effectiveness of options for climate change abatement, but there has been little discussion on the effect of metric choices on cost-effective abatement of near-term climate forcers (NTCFs). These NTCFs are air pollutants primarily regulated by policies outside the climate policy arena and their estimated carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are not typically considered in the evaluation of cost-effective abatement. However, the attention to NTCFs as climate forcers has increased during the last decade. The objective of this paper is to identify whether the relative cost-effectiveness of different NTCF abatement options is robust to climate metric choices. We assess nine plausible NTCF abatement options available in Sweden (with negligible effect on long-lived GHG emissions) and evaluate the robustness of the ranking of these, according to their estimated cost-effectiveness. Different metric designs are considered as well as climate impact uncertainty of NTCFs, with corresponding uncertainty in metric values. The results indicate that the choice of metric has little effect on the ranking of the options according to their cost-effectiveness, with options affecting NOx indicated as an exception. This suggests that the choice of metric utilised when calculating cost-effectiveness of NTCF abatement options is likely to have minor effect on which NTCF abatement options should be targeted for policy interventions (if NOx emissions are not significantly affected).
Highlights
It is well established that global anthropogenic emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases (LLGHG) such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) are causing global climate change
We present the effects of region, metric choice, and time horizon, as well as results from the sensitivity analyses on PM correlation and the PMres assumption
The results are disaggregated in order to analyse which of the climate metrics that has the strongest impact on the variation of the ranking of the abatement options
Summary
It is well established that global anthropogenic emissions of long-lived greenhouse gases (LLGHG) such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) are causing global climate change. The fact that emissions of certain air pollutants have significant climate impact has been gaining widespread international policy recognition for example through the publication of the UNEP synthesis report on nearterm climate protection (Kuylenstierna et al 2011; Shindell et al 2012) and creation of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) in 2012 These air pollutants are generally referred to as near-term climate forcers (NTCFs) and include sulphur dioxide (SO2), black carbon (BC), organic carbon (OC), non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC), nitrogen oxides (NOx), and carbon monoxide (CO). Increased control of NTCF can reduce the rate of global temperature increase, and the peak temperature, contingent that LLGHGs are stringently and perpetually controlled (Bowerman et al 2013; Shoemaker et al 2013)
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