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This thesis reports on the development and testing of a form of participatory budgeting in which citizens are asked to choose from a set of local authority interventions whilst having to comply with two constraints – one financial and the other relating to greenhouse gas emissions. The project has its roots in the weak performance to date of the local government sector in responding to climate change, despite its considerable influence. It is also informed by the troubled relationship between local authorities and citizens. Participatory budgeting is selected as the starting point because it has been found to draw a larger and more diverse audience than more orthodox forms of citizen participation and because it can present participants with a requirement to trade off priorities. The core of the thesis describes the design and development of “participatory emissions budgeting”, a central aspect being the estimation of emissions attributable to local authority interventions. This culminates in formal trials of the method with citizens, followed by quantitative and qualitative evaluation. The method is then presented to a range of local authority stakeholders to gauge their views concerning its potential application. Participatory emissions budgeting is found to be technically feasible: participants consistently arrive, through deliberation, at choice sets that comply with the constraints set. Whilst they report finding the experience interesting and enjoyable, they are critical of the imposition of an emission constraint, in the context of general scepticism concerning the value or legitimacy of tackling climate change through such a decision-making process. Local authority stakeholders see some value in the method but would not wish to apply it as designed – to decide on the allocation of resources. They would rather use it to support decision making within their organisations, as a market-research or educational tool.

AbstractIntegrated assessment models (IAMs) have emerged as key tools for building and assessing long term climate mitigation scenarios. Due to their central role in the recent IPCC assessments, and international climate policy analyses more generally, and the high uncertainties related to future projections, IAMs have been critically assessed by scholars from different fields receiving various critiques ranging from adequacy of their methods to how their results are used and communicated. Although IAMs are conceptually diverse and evolved in very different directions, they tend to be criticised under the umbrella of ‘IAMs’. Here we first briefly summarise the IAM landscape and how models differ from each other. We then proceed to discuss six prominent critiques emerging from the recent literature, reflect and respond to them in the light of IAM diversity and ongoing work and suggest ways forward. The six critiques relate to (a) representation of heterogeneous actors in the models, (b) modelling of technology diffusion and dynamics, (c) representation of capital markets, (d) energy-economy feedbacks, (e) policy scenarios, and (f) interpretation and use of model results.

AbstractGeoengineering has been proposed to stabilize global temperature, but its impacts on crop production and stability are not fully understood. A few case studies suggest that certain crops are likely to benefit from solar dimming geoengineering, yet we show that geoengineering is projected to have detrimental effects for groundnut. Using an ensemble of crop‐climate model simulations, we illustrate that groundnut yields in India undergo a statistically significant decrease of up to 20% as a result of solar dimming geoengineering relative to RCP4.5. It is somewhat reassuring, however, to find that after a sustained period of 50 years of geoengineering crop yields return to the nongeoengineered values within a few years once the intervention is ceased.

Reducing space heating energy demand supports the UK’s legislated carbon emission reduction targets and requires the effective characterisation of the UK’s existing housing stock to facilitate retrofitting decision-making. Approximately 6.6 million UK dwellings pre-date 1919 and are predominantly of suspended timber ground floor construction, the thermal performance of which has not been extensively investigated. This paper examines suspended timber ground floor heat-flow by presenting high resolution in-situ heat-flux measurements undertaken in a case study house at 15 point locations on the floor. The results highlight significant variability in observed heat-flow: point U-values range from 0.56 ± 0.05 to 1.18 ± 0.11 Wm−2 K−1. This highlights that observing only a few measurements is unlikely to be representative of the whole floor heat-flow and the extrapolation from such point values to whole floor U-value estimates could lead to its over- or under- estimation. Floor U-value models appear to underestimate the actual measured floor U-value in this case study. This paper highlights the care with which in-situ heat-flux measuring must be undertaken to enable comparison with models, literature and between studies and the findings support the unique, high-resolution in-situ monitoring methodology used in this study for further research in this area.

Abstract Hydropower investment is a priority in many developing countries, as a means to increase electrification rates and promote national development. However, neglect of dam-affected people's needs, can make them vulnerable to the multifaceted impacts of such projects. Using the case of Cambodia's first large dam, the Kamchay dam, this paper reveals social priorities of affected communities and institutional actors linked to environmental and social implications of large hydropower projects using a preference ranking method. Qualitative research revealed concerns among dam-affected communities which included energy access, livelihood changes, environmental impacts, access to natural resources and compensation. Results also reveal divergence between national and local priorities, which in turn brings about an unequal distribution of costs and benefits of the Kamchay Dam between urban and rural areas. The paper provides recommendations to policy-makers, NGOs and international organizations regarding governance issues, consultation processes and mitigation measures.

A measurement of the underlying activity in scattering processes with a hard scale in the several GeV region is performed in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s) = 0.9 and 7 TeV, using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. The production of charged particles with pseudorapidity |eta| < 2 and transverse momentum pT > 0.5 GeV/c is studied in the azimuthal region transverse to that of the leading set of charged particles forming a track-jet. A significant growth of the average multiplicity and scalar-pT sum of the particles in the transverse region is observed with increasing pT of the leading track-jet, followed by a much slower rise above a few GeV/c. For track-jet pT larger than a few GeV/c, the activity in the transverse region is approximately doubled with a centre-of-mass energy increase from 0.9 to 7 TeV. Predictions of several QCD-inspired models as implemented in PYTHIA are compared to the data. Journal of high energy physics 2011(9), 109(2011). doi:10.1007/JHEP09(2011)109 Published by Springer, Berlin