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Abstract In this study, we investigate the driving forces behind the changes in residential energy consumption (REC) in China’s urban and rural areas over the 2001–2012 period. Based on the logarithmic mean Divisia index method, the REC changes are decomposed into seven driving forces, which are climate change, energy price, energy expenditure mix, energy cost share (in total expenditure), expenditure share (in income), per capita income and population effects. According to the results, climate effect due to increasing days with abnormal temperature, energy cost share effect characterized by more expenditure to be paid for energy use, income effect describing constant income growth in the residential sector definitely increase REC in both urban and rural areas. In contrast, energy prices and energy expenditure mix effects negatively contribute to the REC increase, respectively because of the increase in energy prices and the transition from the low-priced energy to high-priced energy. Expenditure share and population effects play opposite roles in urban and rural areas, and the reasons and implications are analysed in depth.

Current economic instruments aimed at climate change mitigation focus mainly on CO(2) emissions, but efficient climate mitigation needs to focus on other greenhouse gases as well as CO(2). This study investigates the distributional effects of climate change taxes on households belonging to different income and lifestyle groups; and it compares the effects of a CO(2) tax with a multiple GHG tax in the UK in terms of cost efficiency and distributional effects. Results show that a multi GHG tax is more efficient than a CO(2) tax due to lower marginal abatement costs, and that both taxes are regressive, with lower income households paying a relatively larger share of their income for the taxes than higher income households. A shift from a CO(2) tax to a GHG tax will reduce and shift the tax burden between consumption categories such as from energy-intensive products to food products. Consumers have different abilities to respond to the tax and change their behavior due to their own socio-economic attributes as well as the physical environment such as the age of the housing stock, location, and the availability of infrastructure. The housing-related carbon emissions are the largest component of the CO(2) tax payments for low income groups and arguments could be made for compensation of income losses and reduction of fuel poverty through further government intervention.

While park-people conflicts have received worldwide attention, the extent of illegal resource extraction and the relationship with communities' livelihoods has gained little attention in the literature. Thus this paper investigates the impact of socio-economic factors involved in illegal fuel wood and fodder extraction at Bardia National Park in Nepal. Household questionnaires, key-informant interviews and focus groups were conducted to identify different plant species used by households and explore the causes and mode of resource extraction in three buffer zone villages in the park. Altogether 50 different plants were identified by villagers that were used regularly for different livelihood purposes. Almost half of the respondents met their needs by illegally and regularly extracting resources from the park. Incentive schemes in the form of development projects were important but not sufficient in meeting the basic needs of households' especially for such daily items such as fuel wood and fodder. The results described in this paper showed that proximity and access to resources either in the national park, the buffer zone community forest or the government forest, and impact on the livelihoods significantly influenced the likelihood of illegal resource extraction activities. Villages that differed in terms of their location to the resource base, the provision of alternative resources and influence of these on their livelihoods showed significant differences in terms of their patterns of resource extraction and use of these resources. As resource use options, resource interest, and resource extraction patterns were different between villages and dependent on circumstances specific to villages, site-specific management strategies were necessary and more influential than the enforcement of 'one-size fits all' policies. It is suggested that park management plans should be flexible and adaptive enough to meet site-specific contexts and to endear wider support from local communities.

Most households in sub-Saharan Africa rely on wood-based cooking fuels and their number is expected to rise. Despite this, national and subnational energy policies often neglect biomass cooking fuels. A Formative Scenario Analysis process is applied to show how the cooking fuel sector in Kilimanjaro Region (Tanzania) and Kitui County (Kenya) might evolve by 2030. In order to provide relevant knowledge for potential energy policies, this paper aims to identify the main drivers impacting the cooking fuel sector, and to assess and explore current and future demand and supply potential of biomass cooking fuels. Our results show that policies have the potential to substantially impact the future mix of cooking fuels and to foster or hamper the use of efficient cooking fuel technologies. Half of Kilimanjaro Region’s households could be supplied with biogas; in Kitui County, wood-based cooking fuels is likely to remain dominant but improving the efficiency of the technologies would reduce the demand for wood considerably. Hence, we argue that energy policies should explicitly consider biomass cooking fuels and endeavour to make this sector more sustainable and that priority should be given to increasing the sustainability of the biomass cooking fuel sector. Key leverage points to do so are improving the access to improved biomass technologies and capacity building.

Artículos en revistas Since the outset of power system reform, one of the main objectives of regulation has been to assess whether the market, of its own accord, can induce agents to adopt decisions that maximise social welfare. This paper analyses the effect of generating companies' risk aversion on their medium-term (typically 1 year) hydroelectric resource planning, along with its possible inducement of system operation that deviates from the centralised (maximum social welfare) solution. Forward markets may play a key role by making hedging instruments available to risk-averse agents. A stylised mathematical model is used in this study to prove the equivalence of centralised planning and market equilibrium in the presence of such agents under the following assumptions: 1) both the spot and forward markets are perfectly competitive; 2) it has at least one risk-neutral consumer or arbitrageur; 3) all agents share the same beliefs about uncertain parameters; 4) only one price is in place in each trading period (which can be perfectly hedged with a forward contract); and 5) a solution for the resulting market equilibrium problem exists. The findings show that such equivalence vanishes when forward markets are missing or inaccessible (attributable in some electricity markets to the absence of demand-side participation). This article consequently suggests that requiring demand-side agents to sign forward contracts with generators might constitute an effective regulatory measure where no fully functional forward market is already in place. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Recently, in the economics literature, several papers have put forward arguments for using a declining discount rate in social-cost benefit analysis. This paper examines the impact of employing a declining discount rate on the social cost of carbon-the marginal social damage from a ton of emitted carbon. Six declining discounting schemes are implemented in the FUND 2.8 integrated assessment model, including the recent amendments to the Green Book of HM Treasury (Treasury, H.M., 2003. The Greenbook: Appraisal and Evaluation in Central Government. TSO, London). We find that using a declining schedule of discount rates increases the social cost of carbon estimate by as little as 10% or by as much as a factor of 40, depending upon the scenario selected. Although the range of plausible estimates is large, using declining discounting schemes in FUND 2.8 in most cases does not yield values at the £70/tC level suggested by UK DEFRA [Clarkson, R., Deyes, K., 2002. Estimating the social cost of carbon emissions. Government Economic Service Working Paper. HM Treasury, London]. Indeed, only at the higher end of the values of social cost of carbon found here would many climate change related policies - such as the Kyoto Protocol - pass a cost-benefit analysis. This conclusion, however, does not necessarily undermine the ethical and political economic reasons for supporting international collective action on climate change. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The database presents the scenario results of an exploratory research, carried out at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA): the Low Energy Demand (LED) study (Grubler et al. 2018). The LED scenario explored how far transformative changes that combine technological changes, end-use efficiency, and new business models for energy service provision can lead for lowering energy demand, and how these changes could drive deep decarbonisation in the long-term. The scenario development methodology included a bottom-up analysis of how currently existing, though often embryonic, social, institutional, and technological trends could become mainstream with resulting step-changes in efficiency and resulting lowered energy demand. The bottom-up demand estimations were then further explored for their supply side and emissions and climate implications with a top-down modeling framework drawing on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) framework (Riahi et al. 2017). The results show that global final energy demands can be drastically reduced in 2050, to around 245 EJ/yr, or 40% lower than today, whilst significantly expanding human welfare and reducing global development inequalities. According to the knowledge of the authors, LED is the lowest long-term global energy demand scenario ever published. The LED scenario meets the 1.5°C climate target in 2100 without overshoot and keeps the global mean temperature increase below 1.5°C with a probability of more than 60%, without requiring controversial negative emission technologies, such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), that figure prominently in the emission scenario literature (Rogelj et al. 2015, Anderson and Peters 2016, Creutzig et al. 2016, Smith et al. 2016). Furthermore, the beneficial impacts of the LED scenario on a range of other sustainable development goals are also shown, demonstrating that efficiency of energy services provision plays a critical role in reaching low-energy futures without compromising increased living standards in the Global South, while at the same time reducing adverse social and environmental impacts of climate mitigation strategies that focus predominantly on large-scale supply-side transformations. The research is published in a peer-reviewed article in Nature Energy (Grubler et al. 2018) with ample supplementary information. Water consumption and withdrawal data are published in Parkinson et al. (2018). The data is available for download from the LED Database. The content of the LED database and any derived analysis may only be used for non-commercial scientific publications, articles, educational purposes, figures and data tables provided that the source reference pursuant to section 'Required citation' is included and all relevant publications are correctly cited. Partial reproductions of the database content may be stored in online repositories, if this is necessary to comply with a journal's data archiving and access requirements. Such reproductions must be limited to the scope of the manuscript in question, and must include a hyperlink to the source database hosted at https://db1.ene.iiasa.ac.at/LEDDB and the download date from the source database. However, any wholesale duplication, translation, reworking, processing, arrangement, transformation, or reproduction through the internet or any other channels, of the https://db1.ene.iiasa.ac.at/LEDDEB for commercial or non-commercial purposes is not permitted without the explicit written approval of IIASA.

The increasing trend in the consumption of various materials has also led to a huge increase in the final waste streams especially in the form of municipal solid waste (MSW) and the consequent environmental pollutions in particular greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. These have made MSW management a significant environmental issue for governments and policy-makers. To address these challenges, developed countries have implemented sustainable material management (SMM) strategies which have been comprehensively reviewed herein. Moreover, waste generation statistics reported for most of the developed and developing countries as well as the existing gaps in MSW management among these countries have been fully discussed. The present paper was also aimed at comprehensively assessing electricity generation potentials from MSW using an integrated solid waste management system (including three different technologies of anaerobic digestion (AD), incineration, and pyrolysis-gasification) while the consequent GHG emission reduction potentials as a result of their implementation were also explored. To facilitate the understanding of the potential impacts of these treatment strategies, Iran's data were used as a case study. More specifically, the theoretical and technical potentials of electricity generation were calculated and the GHG emission reduction potentials were estimated using a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. Overall, it was found that 5005.4–5545.8 GW h of electricity could be generated from MSW in Iran annually which could lead to approximately 3561–4844 thousand tons of avoided CO2eq. Such GHG reductions would be translated into approximately 0.5% of Iran's annual GHG emissions and would be considered a promising achievement given Iran's international GHGs reduction commitment, i.e., 4% reduction of anthropogenic GHGs emissions by 2030 below the business as usual scenario. Such findings could also be modeled for the other developing countries around the world where efficient MSW management is yet to be implemented.