Documents Environmental Research Letters 18 results

"The world faces unprecedented environmental change, a global biodiversity crisis, and an urgent need for sustainable human development [1]. International and national bodies have set ambitious agendas to help overcome these environmental challenges, such as the United Nations' (UN) Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the pending conservation of 30% of U.S. land and ocean by 2030 (30 by 30). Promptly assessing the status of ecosystems worldwide is essential to evaluate whether we are meeting these programs' objectives and to identify where further progress and targeted action are needed. Ecosystem assessments enable necessary understanding of ecological status by synthesizing multiple aspects of ecological change, including relations between people and ecosystems. However, such assessments have major limitations, as they are often infrequent, multi-year projects that are difficult to repeat and have limited in-situ and human data integration...."

"Low carbon energy transitions are of paramount importance to achieve climate goals. These transitions are not only technical and economical, but also deeply social and gendered. In this paper, we reviewed the academic literature to understand: firstly, what gender vulnerabilities have been discussed in the literature and how they have been embedded in structural dynamics. Secondly, what socio-cultural and socio-economic drivers may lead to these gendered vulnerabilities? Based on content analysis, four key themes emerged from this literature survey: land use change, gender-neutral energy policies, access to resources, and green practices, gender, and culture. These four themes indicate that there are several enabling mechanisms arising from social and structural inequalities, indicative that vulnerabilities ought not to be considered in isolation, but in relationship with others. We also explored dimensions of vulnerability (exposure, sensitivity, adaptative capacity) based on Carley et al (2018 Nat. Energy 3 621–7) to contextualise components of vulnerability in relation to gender. The main finding suggests considering further intersectional approaches to low carbon energy transitions, emphasising acknowledging, and lessening societal inequalities."

"Humid heat impacts a large portion of the world's population that works outdoors. Previous studies have quantified humid heat impacts on labor productivity by relying on exposure response functions that are based on uncontrolled experiments under a limited range of heat and humidity. Here we use the latest empirical model, based on a wider range of temperatures and humidity, for studying the impact of humid heat and recent climate change on labor productivity. We show that globally, humid heat may currently be associated with over 650 billion hours of annual lost labor (148 million full time equivalent jobs lost), 400 billion hours more than previous estimates. These differences in labor loss estimates are comparable to losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Globally, annual heat-induced labor productivity losses are estimated at 2.1 trillion in 2017 PPP$, and in several countries are equivalent to more than 10% of gross domestic product. Over the last four decades, global heat-related labor losses increased by at least 9% (>60 billion hours annually using the new empirical model) highlighting that relatively small changes in climate (<0.5 °C) can have large impacts on global labor and the economy."

"The problem of dynamically inconsistent preferences is common in domestic and international politics. A country's—or indeed the world's—future health (economic, social, environmental, etc.) often requires policy adjustments that are costly and unpopular. Governments face formidable pressures to underinvest today in policies whose consequences are optimal in the future. This challenge may be particularly acute when leaders face accountability mechanisms that induce frequent policy responsiveness such as elections. Policies that automatically adjust in response to other changes are a common proposed solution to these types of problems. To be successful, index-based approaches typically also require delegation to an independent authority. In the realm of climate mitigation, we argue that a combination of automaticity and delegation can provide a promising combination for policymakers to consider as they attempt to develop enduring solutions to climate change."

"Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) have received increasing attention in recent years as BEV technical capabilities have rapidly developed. While many studies have attempted to investigate the societal impacts of BEV adoption, there is still a limited understanding of the extent to which widespread adoption of BEVs may affect both environmental and economic variables simultaneously. This study intends to address this research gap by conducting a comprehensive impact assessment of BEV adoption. Using demand estimates derived from a discrete choice experiment, the impact of various scenarios is evaluated using a computable general equilibrium model. Three drivers of BEV total cost of ownership are considered, namely, subsidy levels, cash incentives by manufacturers, and fuel costs. Furthermore, in light of current trends, improvements in BEV battery manufacturing productivity are considered. This research shows that changes in fuel price and incentives by manufacturers have relatively low impacts on GDP growth, but that the effect of subsidies on GDP and on BEV adoption is considerable, due to a stimulus effect on both household expenditures and on vehicle-manufacturing-related sectors. Productivity shocks moderately impact GDP but only affect BEV adoption in competitive markets. Conversely, the environmental impact is more nuanced. Although BEV adoption leads to decreases in tailpipe emissions, increased manufacturing activity as a result of productivity increases or subsidies can lead to growth in non-tailpipe emissions that cancels out some or all of the tailpipe emissions savings. This demonstrates that in order to achieve desired emissions reductions, policies to promote BEV adoption with subsidies should be accompanied by green manufacturing and green power generation initiatives."

"Labour exposure to heat stress driven by climate change will increase significantly with the rising global temperatures. Under heat stress, workers have to reduce work intensity and take longer breaks from work to prevent occupational illness and injuries. This study explores how the global warming and the resulting increase in heat stress can directly affect productivity of workers and indirectly impact upon the broader economy. Occupational statistics for 269 European regions are combined with daily heat stress indicator derived from a set of high-resolution climate scenarios. The novel approach, enabled by using a set of published exposure-response functions, assesses workers productivity losses differentiated by occupations. A macro econometric model of the European economy is then used to asses implications of change in productivity in monetary terms. The study finds that, compared to nowadays, productivity of labour can be 1.6% lower in Europe in 2080s, with a clear geographical gradient showing that southern and eastern regions are much more affected (e.g. up to 5.4% productivity loss in Greece). Furthermore, regions where the dominant occupations have relative lower earnings would also experience higher productivity loses. The analysis also focuses on the potential role of adaptation to reduce the productivity and economic losses, via air conditioning and a preliminary assessment of the potential of wearable robotics, which can reduce damages by 30%–40%."

"Financial compensations are often proposed to address regressive distributional impacts of carbon taxes. While financial compensations have shown to benefit vulnerable groups distributionally, little is known about their impacts on emission reduction or needs satisfaction. A potential problem with cash compensations is that if households spend this money back into the economy while no additional decarbonisation policies are implemented, emission reductions that arose from the tax may at least partly be reversed. In this letter, we compare the emission savings and impacts on fuel and transport poverty of two compensation options for carbon taxes in 27 European countries. The first option consists of equal per capita rebates for home energy and motor fuel taxes. The second option is the provision of universal green vouchers for renewable electricity and public transport, supported by additional investments in green infrastructures to meet increased demand for such green consumption. Results show that the first option of tax rebates only supports small emission reductions. In contrast, universal green vouchers with expanded green infrastructures would reduce home energy emissions by 92.3 MtCO2e or 13.4%, and motor fuel emissions by 177.5 MtCO2e or 23.8%. If green vouchers and infrastructure were provided without a prior tax, emission savings would be slightly lower compared to the 'tax and voucher' scheme, but fuel and transport poverty would drop by 4.1 and 2.2 percentage points, respectively. In contrast, taxes with rebates would increase fuel and transport poverty by 4.1 and 1.8 percentage points. These findings demonstrate that it is important to take environmental and energy poverty impacts of compensations for unfair distributional impacts of climate policies into account at the design stage. Such compensation measures can achieve higher emission reductions and reduce energy poverty if they involve an expansion of the provision of green goods and services, and if everyone is given fair access to these goods and services."

"This article takes stock of recent literature on health impacts of climate change and air pollution, and the corresponding health benefits of policy action aiming to reduce greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions. We focus particularly on the publications in the Focus Collection on 'Climate Change, Air Pollution and Human Health', which illustrate advances in three key research areas. First, the impacts of global warming and air pollution are unevenly distributed, as they disproportionately affect vulnerable socio-economic groups including older adults, pregnant women, children, and people with lower earnings or education levels. Second, recent research improves our understanding and quantification of impacts identified in earlier work, and explores novel impact pathways such as the associations between allergies and climate change, and between air pollution and diabetes mellitus, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Third, significant synergies in tackling climate change and air pollution can strengthen the case for ambitious policy action. These synergies are heterogeneous across sectors and regions, point to low-hanging fruit among policy options (e.g. phasing out coal), and provide a strong basis for broader sustainable development, improving health and gender equality. Finally, we point out suggestions for future research. Research advances can guide policies to mitigate future climate change, air pollution and the associated health impacts, while informing adaptation strategies that aim to protect the health of the most vulnerable in society."

"The economic impacts of climate change are highly uncertain. Two of the most important uncertainties are the sensitivity of the climate system and the so-called damage functions, which relate climate change to economic costs and benefits. Despite broad awareness of these uncertainties, it is unclear which of them is most important, especially at the regional level. Here we construct regional damage functions, based on two different global damage functions, and apply them to two climate models with vastly different climate sensitivities. We find that uncertainty in both climate sensitivity and aggregate economic damages per degree of warming are of similar importance for the global economic impact of climate change, with the decrease in global economic productivity ranging between 4% and 24% by the end of the century under a high-emission scenario. At the regional level, however, the effects of climate change can vary even more substantially, depending both on a region's initial temperature and the amount of warming it experiences, with some regions gaining in productivity and others losing. The ranges of uncertainty are therefore potentially much larger at a regional level. For example, at the end of the century, under a high-emission scenario, we find that India's productivity decreases between 13% and 57% and Russia's increases between 24% and 74%, while Germany's change in productivity ranges from an increase of 8% to a decrease of 4%. Our findings emphasise the importance of including these uncertainties in estimates of future economic impacts, as they are vital for the resulting impacts and thus policy implications."

"Countries' reliance on global food trade networks implies that regionally different climate change impacts on crop yields will be transmitted across borders. This redistribution constitutes a significant challenge for climate adaptation planning and may affect how countries engage in cooperative action. This paper investigates the long-term (2070–2099) potential impacts of climate change on global food trade networks of three key crops: wheat, rice and maize. We propose a simple network model to project how climate change impacts on crop yields may be translated into changes in trade. Combining trade and climate impact data, our analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we use network community detection to analyse how the concentration of global production in present-day trade communities may become disrupted with climate change impacts. Second, we study how countries may change their network position following climate change impacts. Third, we study the total climate-induced change in production plus import within trade communities. Results indicate that the stability of food trade network structures compared to today differs between crops, and that countries' maize trade is least stable under climate change impacts. Results also project that threats to global food security may depend on production change in a few major global producers, and whether trade communities can balance production and import loss in some vulnerable countries. Overall, our model contributes a baseline analysis of cross-border climate impacts on food trade networks."