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Policymakers may wish to take into account public opinion on climate change as they craft legislation, but if public opinion changes substantially in response to seemingly trivial changes in survey questionnaire design, perhaps such reliance would be unwise. This paper examines 110 experiments implemented in surveys of truly random samples of American adults between 2012 and 2018 (N=4414), exploring the extent to which answers to questions were influenced by order and wording manipulations. Of 144 tests, 31 (22%) yielded statistically significant effects. Adjustments for multiple hypothesis tests reduced this percentage to between 7 and 9%. The effect sizes are routinely small. These results are consistent with the conclusion that survey results on climate change issues are relatively robust, so policymakers can take them seriously if they wish to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of the carbon budget is a powerful conceptual tool to define and quantify the climate challenge. Whilst scientists present the carbon budget as the geophysical foundation for global net-zero targets, the financial metaphor of a budget implies figuratively the existence of a ‘budget manager’ who oversees the budget balance. Using this fictive character of budget manager as a heuristic device, the paper analyses the roles of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM) under a carbon budget. We argue that both CDR and SRM can be understood as ‘technologies of offset’. CDR offsets positive carbon emissions by negative emissions, whereas SRM offsets the warming from positive greenhouse gas forcing by the induced cooling from negative forcing. These offset technologies serve as flexible budgeting tools in two different strategies for budget management: they offer the promise of achieving a balanced budget, but also introduce the possibility for running a budget deficit. The lure of offsetting rests on the flexibility of keeping up an ‘appearance’ of delivering a given budget whilst at the same time easing budget constraints for a certain period of time. The political side-effect of offsetting is to change the stringency of budgetary constraints from being regulated by geophysics to being adjustable by human discretion. As a result, a budget deficit can be normalised as an acceptable fiscal condition. We suggest that the behavioural tendency of policymakers to avoid blame could lead them to resort to using offset technologies to circumvent the admission of failure to secure a given temperature target. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cost of capital is an important driver of investment decisions, including the large investments needed to execute the low-carbon energy transition. Most models, however, abstract from country or technology differences in cost of capital and use uniform assumptions. These might lead to biased results regarding the transition of certain countries towards renewables in the power mix and potentially to a sub-optimal use of public resources. In this paper, we differentiate the cost of capital per country and technology for European Union (EU) countries to more accurately reflect real-world market conditions. Using empirical data from the EU, we find significant differences in the cost of capital across countries and energy technologies. Implementing these differentiated costs of capital in an energy model, we show large implications for the technology mix, deployment, carbon emissions and electricity system costs. Cost-reducing effects stemming from financing experience are observed in all EU countries and their impact is larger in the presence of high carbon prices. In sum, we contribute to the development of energy system models with a method to differentiate the cost of capital for incumbent fossil fuel technologies as well as novel renewable technologies. The increasingly accurate projections of such models can help policymakers engineer a more effective and efficient energy transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ricardian literature has only a handful of contributions addressing the presence of spatial heterogeneity in the marginal effects of climate change on agriculture. Although the majority of these studies offer models with group-specific slope parameters to account for spatial heterogeneity, large discrepancies on which grouping should be preferred still exist. This paper evaluates the extent to which expected future agricultural profits is sensitive to the four pre-determined groupings currently used in the literature. The results indicate that accounting for grouping uncertainty greatly increases the confidence interval around projected climate impacts. In addition, we do not find that one type of grouping is superior to any other. We suggest two potential solutions and emphasize the importance of explicitly controlling for grouping uncertainty in future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Societies adapt to climate variations and develop unique cultures that lead to distinctive economic behaviour across different regions. To estimate the climate-economic link and test the hypothetical role of culture, this paper uses a nationwide survey at the household level in China, together with historical temperature data at the prefectural city level for empirical analysis. The results show the significant role of local climate variations on consumption, savings and investment decisions by households. Harsh weather conditions are associated with lower consumption, lower income and higher savings. Such climate characteristics are also associated with a lower probability of purchasing risky financial assets. Using a sample of migrating families, we find strong evidence that culture is an important channel in the climate-economic relationship. Additional support for this view is found through the “catching up with the Joneses” effect documented in the economics literature. Overall, this research provides an alternative perspective for understanding the long-term behavioural impact of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is frequently predicted to result in dramatic increases in international migration, yet current research has largely failed to identify such movements in practice. This paper sheds light on this apparent paradox. Drawing on Hirschman’s treatise on Exit, Voice and Loyalty, we provide empirical evidence that voicing about climatic change, as captured through media reports, is associated with greater exposure to climate risks and lower emigration rates. Our finding is consistent with individuals’ variously responding to climatic change either by emigrating or remaining and voicing about climatic change, with the aim of influencing current mitigation, adaptation or compensation policies. Our results, in turn, have implications for policies aimed at shaping international migration patterns and the ability of governments and residents to voice their concerns about climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sea levels will rise, even with stringent climate change mitigation. Mitigation will slow the rate of rise. There is limited knowledge on how the costs of coastal protection vary with alternative global warming levels of 1.5 to 4.0 °C. Analysing six sea-level rise scenarios (0.74 to 1.09 m, 50th percentile) across these warming levels, and five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, this paper quantifies the economic costs of flooding and protection due to sea-level rise using the Dynamic Interactive Vulnerability Assessment (DIVA) modelling framework. Results are presented for World Bank income groups and five selected countries from the present to 2100. Annual sea flood damage costs without additional adaptation are more influenced by socio-economic development than sea-level rise, indicating that there are opportunities to control risk with development choices. In contrast, annual sea dike investment costs are more dependent on the magnitude of sea-level rise. In terms of total costs with adaptation, upper middle, low middle and low income groups are projected to have higher relative costs as a proportion of GDP compared with high income groups. If low income countries protected now, flood costs could be reduced after 2050 and beyond. However, without further adaptation, their coasts will experience growing risks and costs leaving them increasingly reliant on emergency response measures. Without mitigation or adaptation, greater inequalities in damage costs between income groups could result. At country level, annual sea flood damage costs without additional adaptation are projected to rapidly increase with approximately 0.2 m of sea-level rise, leaving limited time to plan and adapt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Paris Agreement of 2015, most countries have agreed to reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions according to individually set Nationally Determined Contributions. However, national CO2 emissions are reported by individual countries and cannot be directly measured or verified by third parties. Inherent weaknesses in the reporting methodology may misrepresent, typically an under-reporting of, the total national emissions. This paper applies the theory of sequential testing to design a statistical monitoring procedure that can be used to detect systematic under-reportings of CO2 emissions. Using simulations, we investigate how the proposed sequential testing procedure can be expected to work in practice. We find that, if emissions are reported faithfully, the test is correctly sized, while, if emissions are under-reported, detection time can be sufficiently fast to help inform the 5 yearly global “stocktake” of the Paris Agreement. We recommend the monitoring procedure be applied going forward as part of a larger portfolio of methods designed to verify future global CO2 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to “strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty” (UNFCCC 2015). Designing a global mitigation strategy to support this goal poses formidable challenges. For one, there are trade-offs between the economic costs and the environmental benefits of averting climate impacts. Furthermore, the coupled human-Earth systems are subject to deep and dynamic uncertainties. Previous economic analyses typically addressed either the former, introducing multiple objectives, or the latter, making mitigation actions responsive to new information. This paper aims at bridging these two separate strands of literature. We demonstrate how information feedback from observed global temperature changes can jointly improve the economic and environmental performance of mitigation strategies. We focus on strategies that maximize discounted expected utility while also minimizing warming above 2 °C, damage costs, and mitigation costs. Expanding on the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model and previous multi-objective efforts, we implement closed-loop control strategies, map the emerging trade-offs and quantify the value of the temperature information feedback under both well-characterized and deep climate uncertainties. Adaptive strategies strongly reduce high regrets, guarding against mitigation overspending for less sensitive climate futures, and excessive warming for more sensitive ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we evaluate a single-index polymorphic production function that relates agricultural output to temperature and precipitation. The advantage of this new approach to measuring agricultural vulnerability under climatic change is that a single-index measure of vulnerability can capture a range of climate responses including plateau effects. The approach identifies plateau effects in the crop yield-weather relationship and provides overall fits consistent with higher-order polynomial fitting. We apply the technique to corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton at the USA county level. We illustrate its computation and use as a critical policy variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the dynamic relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and income growth for the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. There has been a lively debate about the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), which postulates the presence of an inverted U-shaped pattern for pollution levels as income increases. Our study proposes a new approach that models the emissions–income nexus without imposing any prior shape on the EKC. Accordingly, we suggest the implementation of a nonlinear panel threshold regression framework in which the change in the dynamics of environmental quality can be modeled endogenously from the data. The empirical results reveal the presence of a threshold effect in CO2 emissions, as the impact of income changes nonlinearly depending on different energy-related variables. We note the role of the energy fuel mix in mitigating emissions as MENA countries switch to low-carbon sources of energy and renewables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Correction to this paper has been published: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change poses significant challenges and impacts to coastal communities. In order to limit future coastal flood risk, adaptation is necessary. This study presents an integrated model to simulate storm surge inundation risk in Osaka Bay under climate change and provide a cost–benefit analysis of structure adaptation strategies to reduce risk. The results show that storm surge inundation risk will increase dramatically as combined impacts of sea level rise and intensified storm surges due to global warming. Without adaptation measures, the expected annual damage cost increases from 9.85 billion JPY to 69.17 billion JPY in Osaka Bay under the projected RCP8.5 scenario to 2100. We then explore the effectiveness of structural adaptation strategies. The results indicate that raising the height of existing dikes can reduce inundation risk effectively. The benefits and costs depend on the elevated height and the discount rate. Using cost–benefit analysis, we find that upgrading by 1 m the height of existing dikes is the most cost-effective strategy for Osaka Bay. The methodology developed in this paper provides a reference for Osaka Bay and other coastal regions when they make coastal flood risk management and adaptation strategies to respond to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Correction to this paper has been published: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Correction to this paper has been published: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online version of the original article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03190-1 B Correction to: Climatic Change b https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03190-1 In the original publication, author P.P. Stoll was incorrectly linked to all the affiliations on the paper. Publisher's note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. [Extracted from the article]