• Energy Research
• 1. No poverty close
• 4. Education close
• CH close
• IN close
• English close

This dataset contains the underlying data for the following publication: Li, R., Perdana, S., Vielle, M. (2021), Potential integration of Chinese and European emissions trading market: welfare distribution analysis, Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 26:22 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-021-09960-7.

Despite alarmist claims in the public discourse about the consequences of environmentally-induced migration for security, little empirical research has attempted to evaluate the contention. This dissertation, therefore, sets out to examine the linkage between environmental change, rural-urban migration, and nativist violence. To do so, it presents new data on rural-urban migration for 17 Sub-Saharan African countries. The findings unambiguously indicate that climate change does affect rural-urban migration flows, but only to a limited extent. In turn, these migratory flows may cause a moderate increase in the probability of nativist violence, particularly when the native population is marginalized by the central government. The findings, thus, reject the alarmist predictions. Climate change is unlikely to cause mass migration and, as a consequence, to substantially destabilize states.

The constituent countries of the MENA region---defined in this thesis in conformity with the regional definition of the International Energy Agency and encompassing 17 Muslim countries in North Africa, in the Levant, on the Arabian Peninsula, and Iran---have developed very rapidly over the past decade. Two figures best exemplify the region's tremendous transformation: Total population has expanded by more than 20% and its aggregate economic output has more than doubled. As much as this development is desirable, said development trends have also dramatically reshaped the energy policy environment in the MENA region and began causing problems of their own---affecting the region's large oil exporters and its energy importers alike. Having traditionally enjoyed high energy security and handsome resource rents by virtue of their abundant and cheap fossil fuels, new realities in the domestic energy systems demand a new policy focus on domestic energy issues. Energy challenges have emerged which threaten security of supply, fiscal stability, and environmental integrity. The challenges differ in magnitude from country-to-country and reflect the specific national conditions and circumstances. However, given the similarity in the underlying drivers and the governing energy policies, the energy challenges resemble each other across borders. More specifically, ballooning domestic energy demand consumes a rising share of national energy production and thus increasingly imperils the constant flow of the much needed proceeds from oil and gas exports. In the MENA countries with less abundant hydrocarbon resources, domestic demand growth has heightened energy dependence and, to make matters worse, the tighter supply situation in the energy exporting neighbors may eventually also lead to a discontinuation of the preferential supply agreements which they have benefitted from in the past. As a further corollary of demand growth, massive capital-intensive infrastructure investments are necessary to keep pace with the growth on the demand side. The regional tradition to sell energy commodities domestically at prices non-competitive prices or even below cost, however, limits the national energy sectors' own capability of mustering the required capital. Finally, the universally observable heavily fossil fuel-dominated national energy mixes in the region render the study countries vulnerable to supply shocks. The virtually complete reliance on the regionally available hydrocarbons for meeting energy demand is also a principal contributor to environmental degradation and at the core of the large carbon footprint of energy consumption in MENA countries. Given current policies in combination with the emerging demographic and economic trends, these challenges must be expected to become more severe in the years to come. Rising living standards, especially in the region's expanding urban population, are likely to boost per capita energy consumption. The projected, continued demographic and economic growth will further drive commodity demand. And the supply side cannot be counted on to mitigate the challenges under given policies. On the contrary. Although no reliable production projections are available, it stands to reason that production from the region's most prolific oil and gas fields---some of which have been producing for several decades now---will increasingly require the use of costly secondary and tertiary recovery methods and that some will eventually [...]

Our society is facing the urge of resolving two primary challenges. On the one hand CLIMATE CHANGE, triggered by unsustainable production and consumption patterns, results in the imminent threat of environmental collapse. On the other hand, a severe RAISING HOUSING GAP IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH induces the sprawling of inadequate undignified INFORMAL URBANIZATION. These challenges are intertwined since the housing construction sector significantly contributes to the societY environmental impact, adding to the burden of the climate change emergency. Given this context, the current dissertation aims to unfold and operationalize the regenerative potential of the housing sector within the informal city, therefore conceiving the housing construction as a trigger for HOLISTIC SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT. To achieve the stated objective, this work is articulated around three case studies utilized to assess the impact of housing construction-related actions on the project societal dimension within a specific project scale. These are: shelters within the POST-DISASTER RECONSTRUCTION context, assessed at the MATERIAL LEVEL; the informal city of BANGKOK, assessed at the BUILDING UNIT LEVEL; and the informal city of NAIROBI, assessed at the TERRITORIAL LEVEL. A fourth case study is then introduced to combine the three scales within an INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT: the informal city of CAPE TOWN. This is also utilized to identify specific construction-related actions capable of impacting the societal project outcome and sustainability as intended within the regenerative approach. The METHODS utilized to assess the case studies are mixed and include data collection on the field through semi-structured interviews, mapping, stakeholder assessment as well as supply chain mapping, technical assessments, and social network analysis. A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK is then proposed to assess the housing construction regenerative potential, expressed as contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. The framework is based on the learning from the case studies and their stakeholders’ based multilevel approach, and is proposed as the basis for an OPERATIVE TOOL for project management and post-evaluation, serving the humanitarian actors active within the construction sector. The present dissertation demonstrates the relevance of looking at the housing construction sector in the informal city as an opportunity to restore local economies, wellbeing and ecosystems through tailored strategies, varying from material production to management schemes. It shows the validity of adopting a regenerative approach within the informal settlements upgrading and affordable housing delivery to target at once the achievement of social and environmental justice.

The worldwide increasing energy consumption is mainly based on fossil fuel which leads to a large number of environmental problems. Indeed, the combustion of fossil fuels releases into the atmosphere different greenhouse gases and harmful pollutants which are responsible for climate change and cause air quality degradation. Moreover, fossil fuel resources are limited and their depletion will happen sooner or later. Governments of the whole world are urged to take relevant measures and policies for energy transition. To support their choices, different decision support approaches have been developed, mainly in industrialized countries. However, these approaches usually lack coherent integration and rely on expensive and often unavailable detailed data, especially in developing countries. This PhD aims at developing alternative methods for the assessment of air quality and energy strategies in the framework of developing countries. The developed methods are implemented in Cuba which seems an excellent test case to design and apply energy strategies for developing countries. The first part of this work deals with methods intended to reliable assess air quality. For this purpose, an air pollution measurement campaign was carried out in Havana. It provided data to implement and improve a pre-existing methodology capable of estimating Cuban vehicle emission factors. Statistical analysis indicated that traffic accounted for around 50% of particular matter concentration levels. Furthermore, vehicles pre-1980s were identified as the most polluting technologies at the street level. This work also demonstrates the usability of an emission inventory designed for air quality simulations. Benchmarking tools developed in the framework of the Forum for Air Quality Modelling in Europe helped to pinpoint differences between global and regional inventories, and identify where efforts should concentrate for improving emission data. This research also sets up simplified algebraic relationships (i.e. so-called Source-Receptor Relationship) capable of predicting the impacts on concentration levels resulting from regional emission abatement strategies, while being more time-efficient than traditional methods. The second part is dedicated to exploring scenarios for a reliable Cuban energy transition. To this end, the energy fluxes between resources, technologies and final demand were computed for the year 2015. A set of scenarios were then designed on the basis of different mixes of energy resources. These scenarios have been compared according to three criteria that seemed the most relevant for the country geopolitical and economic situation: energy security (degree of dependence from energy imports), sustainability of the energy resources and population exposure to harmful pollutants. Overall, the results indicated that energy security and sustainability increase with wind and solar penetration at different rates. A penetration rate of 20% of the demand significantly decreases fossil fuel requirements and imports. Once raised to 50%, Cuba can achieve complete energy independence. The scenario which fulfils 100% of the electricity demands from solar and wind resources shows the maximum of sustainability. Not surprisingly, the penetration of renewables had positive effects on air quality.

Economics Working Paper Series, 20/333

The concept of social exclusion is context-specific and there is no uniform paradigm of exclusion across the world. This paper attempts to analyse exclusion of resource-poor groups in watershed development programmes in the Indian context. It aims to explore excluded community groups from the perspective of people’s equal opportunity and equal access to newly generated economic benefits in watershed development programmes. The paper also traces the determinant factors responsible for denial and exclusion of resource-poor groups and describes the detailed processes involved in their exclusion from institutional and livelihood opportunities in watershed programmes. At the same time, the paper also explores suggestions and views of resource-poor groups about their meaningful social inclusion in watershed programme. The Gadiwat Indo-German Watershed Development Project in Aurangabad district in the State of Maharashtra is studied in detail in terms of its social, economic and political realities through mix-method and multi-stakeholder approaches. The key findings of the paper are that landownership, caste, gender, membership in village institutions and/or watershed institutions or close relationship with members, as well as the limitations of the programme guidelines, are the major determinants of institutional inclusion and the extent of resulting economic benefits. The exclusion of resource-poor groups mainly takes the form of their exclusion from institutional representation. In order to promote meaningful social inclusion of resource-poor groups, there is need for a more livelihood-oriented focus and their equal representation and participation in watershed institutions.

Global climate change is among the most important and severe challenges the international community has ever faced. Existing evidence shows that climatic changes will have far-reaching repercussions for ecosystems and humans alike. For instance, projections expect climate change to induce mass population movements due to hazards like droughts, sea level rise, or extreme weather events, particularly in low-income countries with limited capacity to protect themselves and adapt to such climatic changes. However, these projections are largely based on extrapolations from the population at risk of experiencing adverse climatic events. The recent literature therefore highlights that projections on climate-related migration should account for the possibility that people can adapt to changing climatic conditions. This is particularly relevant for slow-onset environmental changes such as droughts, salinization, or erosion, which individuals and societies can anticipate and adapt to. This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of whether, when, and how environmental changes lead to human migration. Theoretically, I link environmental changes to individual-level migration decisions by applying the aspirations-capabilities framework. I argue that exposure to environmental changes can increase someone’s aspirations to move away, while such exposure also has the potential of eroding the capability to move. People will move if they have both the aspiration and the capability to move. If one of the two is lacking, people remain immobile. Importantly, this concept also allows to differentiate “involuntary non-migrants” who would like to move away but lack the capability to do so from “voluntary non-migrants” who could move away but do not want to. Empirically, I employ a novel, self-collected panel data set of around 1700 household heads residing along the Jamuna River in northern Bangladesh, an area affected by riverbank erosion and flooding during the yearly recurring monsoon season. Through a multi-stage clustered sampling design, I obtained a sample representative of the rural population in the case study region. In a quasi-experimental approach, I surveyed respondents at a similar baseline risk of being affected before the environmental changes occurred. By re-interviewing both affected and unaffected respondents after the environmental changes have materialized, and both those who migrated and those who stayed, I can link any differences I observe between affected and unaffected respondents to the environmental shocks. This causal link makes a major empirical contribution to the literature on environmental migration that overwhelmingly applies secondary or retrospective data. In the empirical chapter I, I examine how the populations along the Jamuna perceive environmental and climatic changes and I compare these perceptions to objectively measured data. I find that perceptions of long-term temperature changes are more in line with meteorological evidence than those of precipitation. This finding is remarkable given that most of the respondents do not know the term climate change. Further, respondents grossly overestimate the extent of erosion that has occurred in their village in the previous year. Since human behavior is shaped by their perceptions rather than by objective data, this underlines the importance of considering people’s perceptions rather than exclusively relying on natural scientific data. Chapters II and III study how affectedness by riverbank erosion and flooding influences migration aspirations and migration behavior, respectively. The results suggest that riverbank erosion has a significant positive impact on both aspirations and the likelihood of migration. The effect of flood affectedness, by contrast, remains largely insignificant. This can be linked to the important role of flooding for the livelihood cycle of riverine populations, while erosion only has negative and potentially very detrimental effects on livelihoods. Lastly, chapter IV studies immobility in the context of environmental changes. I show that a majority (83%) of those who stay put after the monsoon season qualify as “voluntary/acquiescent non-migrants”, while 17% of the non-migrants can be classified as “involuntary”. Environmental shocks increase the respondents’ migration aspirations while reducing their capability to move. Hence, they might lead to “trapped populations” – a term which describes individuals who would like to move away but cannot. This dissertation provides valuable insights of broader relevance into whether and how societies react, or could react, to slow-onset climatic changes such as sea-level rise, drought, and soil/water salinity. Moreover, the methodology developed in the project can be applied to other cases and thereby inform prediction models of future climate-induced migration. Similarly, the findings could be utilized by institutional actors at local, national, and international levels when seeking to identify policy options to increase the adaptive capacity of populations vulnerable to climatic changes – supporting both those who would like to move and those who prefer to stay put.

The recent rise of food cost in world markets has accelerated the research examining the underlying factors for this rise. The present research investigated the separate and combined impacts of three factors thought to contribute to the price rise: adverse weather events, strong and sustained growth in high populated countries, and increased biofuels production. The research further analysed the effects of these price rises on consumption expenditures in Brazil, China and India. Analyses were carried out using a partial equilibrium trade model with a focus on the 2004 to 2007 period. The modelling suggests that the most important factor behind the price rise depends on the commodity, with maize/corn, oilseeds, and sugar most affected by biofuels, while some meats and dairy products are more affected by income growth.