Synergies and trade-offs of climate change mitigation policies: an integrative assessment approach

Abstract

The large degree of transformational change that would be necessary to limit global temperature change to 2°C would not only avoid dangerous climate change, but will affect societies in many more aspects. Depending how these transformations are designed, they can have co-benefits and trade-offs for other economic, social or environmental objectives and influence the policy costs of reaching such objectives.The aim of this thesis is to assess synergies and trade-offs of climate change mitigation policies. For this purpose, an IAM has been used that integrates socioeconomic, energy, land and climate systems. Additional modules to this model have been designed throughout the course of the PhD, as well as a link with another method to process model outputs with the aim of assessing synergies and trade-offs and check for robustness of specific policies.More concretely, chapter 2 analyses the role of behavioural change in the climate change mitigation portfolio, and its impact on climate policy costs. Chapter 3 looks at the land use occupation of solar energy and the related environmental impacts in terms of land cover change and land use change emissions. In the next chapters, a link is introduced between an integrated assessment model and robust portfolio analysis. Chapter 4 uses this link to optimise low-carbon power technology investment portfolio in order to achieve both greenhouse gas emission savings and energy security improvement, while chapter 5 uses the link by optimizing energy technology subsidies, mixed with land policies, in developing countries to achieve simultaneous progress in three different Sustainable Development Goals.