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The resources and energy sectors make a significant contribution to economic performance in the economies of West Asia. In this study we explore the effect ambitious policies for resource efficiency and greenhouse gas abatement would have on West Asian economies and what their contribution to environmental sustainability could look like. We employ the Global Trade and Environmental Resource Model (GTEM-Resource) to empirically assess the economic and environmental implications of global policy initiatives in the region. Results show that resource efficiency and greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement policies are complementary in their effects. Resource efficiency policies boost resource use productivity in the region, reduce all categories of material extraction based on sustainable consumption and production behaviour and also caused by trade, and foster economic performance. By contrast, GHG emission abatement policies have a small effect on resource productivity but drive significant GHG reductions that are accompanied by reduced economic performance. When these two policies are combined, real GDP in West Asia is projected to increase by 8% relative to business-as-usual by 2060, while resource extraction and GHG emissions levels in the region would decline dramatically by 40% and 50%, respectively. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would be much better off, compared to other countries in the region, with large increases in real GDP and major reductions in GHG emissions and resource extraction levels. Findings suggest that technology development and climate mitigation policies would result in a win-win solution for all countries in West Asia, contributing to maintaining well-being and protecting the environment on regional and global scales. This shows that there is a pathway to economic prosperity for resource-rich countries and regions. • Resource Efficiency policies substantially foster economic growth in West Asia. • The Towards Sustainability scenario maintains sustainable development in West Asia. • Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Oman reduce their material extraction rates by over 46% by 2060. • Well-being indicators grow faster than resource extraction, with improved resource productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Battery-electric heavy-duty vehicles are considered a potential solution to reduce emissions in freight transport and increase energy security. However, battery-electric trucks are not a one-fits-all solution due to current battery technology limitations and vast diversity in freight operations and vehicle categories. Although the literature available in electric truck feasibility provides an insightful overview of their potential, it does not fully cover the performance variations under adverse climate and technical conditions. This paper attempts to fill the gap in the literature by quantifying the impact of low temperatures, headwind, variable payload, and tail-lift use over different freight vehicles from a case study fleet in Iceland. NREL's FASTSim is the vehicle energy consumption model used for the analysis. The study also addresses on-route fast-charging, considering realistic non-linear charging rates and performance in low temperatures. The results showed that the range of the analyzed vehicles can experience a decrease of 41–47% under unfavorable conditions, compared to the estimated range under ideal conditions. Short-haul routes could be electrified even under the most challenging conditions, while regional routes might require some planification adjustments to reach 100% route electrification in tough conditions. On-route charging would be necessary to achieve full fleet electrification. In tough conditions, sprinter vans met 49% (85% with charging) of the analyzed routes, while trucks met 83% (90% with charging). The outcomes of this research support several UN Sustainable Development Goals (3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13), and could be used to develop specific measures within the Icelandic 2020 Climate Action Plan. The methodology used is feasibly replicable for teams who wish to perform a similar analysis in different contexts. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Analyzes European household's willingness to mitigate climate change through changes in consumption behavior. • New analytical perspective through Qualitative Comparative Analysis in large-N design. • Highlights the contribution of health information for willingness to mitigate. • Demonstrates limitations of financial incentives to motivate behavioural change. • Points to need for different policy design to motivate household mitigation of GHG emissions. Abstract The climate change mitigation potential of the production side has been discussed very frequently, but private citizens and households have received less systematic attention. Thus, this paper focuses on the willingness of private households to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. While many scholars study the socio-economic characteristics of people to then recommend policies, we change the analytical perspective and look at the characteristics of climate mitigation actions that affect households' willingness to adopt these measures: Costs, emission reductions, behavioral change, and consumption sector. The paper uses data from HOPE (HOusehold Preferences for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in four European high-income countries), an interdisciplinary project investigating households' preferences for reducing greenhouse gas in four countries (France, Germany, Norway and Sweden). We use a fuzzy-set QCA (fsQCA) to analyze which attributes are necessary or sufficient conditions for specific actions to be selected by participants of HOPE. The results of the fsQCA show that Food & Recycling actions are particularly popular. The general pattern that was found shows that people prefer actions that are easy to implement even though they often do not reduce the CO2e-Footprint by much. Therefore, the condition Behavioral Change is the most important lever in improving households' willingness to act on climate change. Moreover, the analysis of Health Information suggests that there is an urgent need to go beyond financial arguments in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Policy responses to (un)sustainable consumption have overlooked contextual drivers of action. • A novel contextual, human-centred approach to studying dynamics in consumption is presented. • A web of contextual drivers, incl. technology, economics and planning policies, shape action. • Patterns of social differentiation in the experience of socio-technical change are identified. • Policies responses require a greater challenge to social contexts than is currently recognised. Abstract Understanding how social change has intersected with transformations in key resource-intensive domestic consumption practices that comprise part of the fabric and experience of daily living is of central relevance to questions of sustainable development. Despite recent advances in contextual approaches to consumption, little is known about how wider socio-technical transitions have been experienced in the context of lived lives and everyday performances. As a result, sustainable development policies have been largely removed from the lived challenges and experiences people face in their daily lives. This paper explores the value of a human-centred, contextual approach to energy transitions research for revealing the intersections of lives, practices and contexts in energy systems change. Investigating the question of how everyday practices have intersected with processes of social-technical change, it reports on findings from a recent Irish-based qualitative biographic investigation of dynamics in domestic consumption. Analysis reveals that a complex web of contextual processes, including technological change, economic transitions and planning policies, have shaped consumption in the home. Furthermore, social differentiation in the lived experience of socio-technical change along dimensions of gender, social class and geography was observed. The paper concludes with reflections on the international relevance and implications of these findings for sustainable development policy, suggesting sustainable consumption requires a much more fundamental challenge to social contexts than is recognised by dominant approaches. Here it is argued that human-centred, contextual approaches to sustainability transitions that consider social differentiation in complex lived experiences are necessary to design more integrated and resilient energy futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Driving forces behind behaviors and their carbon intensities are different. • Highly populated areas have lower reduce emissions in domains of high lock-in. • Income, household size, heating source and refurbishment trends should be regarded. • Top-down incentives are needed to tackle emissions for air travel and fossil fuels. • Car-ownership is a significant carbon lock-in even at low travel distances. Abstract As climate policy needs to address all feasible ways to reduce carbon emissions, there is an increasing focus on demand-side solutions. Studies of household carbon footprints have allocated emissions during production to the consumption of the produced goods, and provided an understanding of what products and consumer actions cause significant emissions. Social scientists have investigated how attitudes, social norms, and structural factors shape salient behavior. Yet, there is often a disconnect as emission reductions through individual actions in the important domains of housing and mobility are challenging to attain due to lock-ins and structural constraints. Furthermore, most behavioral research focuses on actions that are easy to trace but of limited consequence as a share of total emissions. Here we study specific alternative consumption patterns seeking both to understand the behavioral and structural factors that determine those patterns and to quantify their effect on carbon footprints. We do so utilizing a survey on consumer behavioral, attitudinal, contextual and socio-demographic factors in four different regions in the EU. Some differences occur in terms of the driving forces behind behaviors and their carbon intensities. Based on observed differences in mobility carbon footprints across households, we find that the key determining element to reduced emissions is settlement density, while car ownership, rising income and long distances are associated with higher mobility footprints. For housing, our results indicate that changes in dwelling standards and larger household sizes may reduce energy needs and the reliance on fossil fuels. However, there remains a strong need for incentives to reduce the carbon intensity of heating and air travel. We discuss combined effects and the role of policy in overcoming structural barriers in domains where consumers as individuals have limited agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing demand for agricultural products partly due to the high population growth requires agriculture to struggle for productivity improvement. However, productivity search is constrained by environmental preoccupations, raising the question of agricultural development models to be adopted to increase productivity while limiting environmental consequences. This paper examines the role of market orientation by assessing the effect of agricultural commodity export on greenhouse gas emissions relatively to local market oriented agricultural production model. Using panel data from 1986 to 2010 for 136 countries around the world, and accurate instrumental variables technique, the findings suggest that the proportion of primary commodity export in agricultural production increases greenhouse gas emissions. These results are robust to different sources of agricultural export and environmental data, and to the inclusion of additional control variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five new scenarios, or Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), have been developed, spanning a range of challenges to mitigation and challenges to adaptation. The Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 4 (SSP4), “Inequality” or “A Road Divided,” is one of these scenarios, characterized by low challenges to mitigation and high challenges to adaptation. We describe, in quantitative terms, the SSP4 as implemented by the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM), the marker model for this scenario. We use demographic and economic assumptions, in combination with technology and non-climate policy assumptions to develop a quantitative representation of energy, land-use and land-cover, and emissions consistent with the SSP4 narrative. The scenario is one with stark differences within and across regions. High-income regions prosper, continuing to increase their demand for energy and food. Electrification increases in these regions, with the increased generation being met by nuclear and renewables. Low-income regions, however, stagnate due to limited economic growth. Growth in total consumption is dominated by increases in population, not increases in per capita consumption. Due to failures in energy access policies, these regions continue to depend on traditional biofuels, leading to high pollutant emissions. Declining dependence on fossil fuels in all regions means that total radiative forcing absent the inclusion of mitigation or impacts only reaches 6.4 W m −2 in 2100, making this a world with relatively low challenges to mitigation. We explore the effects of mitigation effort on the SSP4 world, finding that the imposition of a carbon price has a varied effect across regions. In particular, the SSP4 mitigation scenarios are characterized by afforestation in the high-income regions and deforestation in the low-income regions. Furthermore, we find that the SSP4 is a world with low challenges to mitigation, but only to a point due to incomplete mitigation of land-related emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Three behaviors are responsible for 63–81% of indirect household carbon emissions. • Household carbon inequality larger than income inequality in poorer provinces. • On average, over 50% of a province's carbon accounts are self-production emissions. • Most CO 2 inflows/outflows of a province relate to 5 consuming/producing provinces. • Most CO 2 inflows/outflows of a province relate to 3 local/non-local sectors. The design of "fairness" and "justice" climate policies for controlling indirect household carbon emissions (IHCEs) requires joint efforts from the demand side and supply side. On the demand side, this study constructs behavior-specific IHCEs inventory for different household groups (differed by income level) in different regions to identify high-emitting households and corresponding high-emitting consumption behaviors. On the supply side, the "Carbon Account" is set up for different regions regarding various household consumption behaviors to screen all potential emitting-related stakeholders in the entire demand–supply chains. Using 25 Chinese provinces as study cases, the findings indicate that carbon inequalities across household groups are greater than income inequalities in poorer provinces, whereas the opposite is true in richer provinces. For most high emitting households (most were middle-high- and high-income households) in 25 provinces, Food & Beverage, Housing, and Durable goods are the top 3 carbon-intensive consumption behaviors, together accounting for 64–81% (72% on average) of total IHCEs. For the three carbon-intensive behaviors, the province-level carbon account analysis shows that a province's self-production emissions (local consumption, local emissions) took up an average of 52%, 70%, and 47% of its carbon accounts. An average of 83%, 80%, and 79% of net carbon transfer-in of a province (non-local consumption, local emissions) sourced from its 5 major consuming provinces, while 76%, 81%, and 77% of transfer-out (local consumption, non-local emissions) of a province were outsourced to its 5 major producing provinces, respectively. Furthermore, according to the sector-level carbon accounts, an average of 75%, 89%, and 76% of the sector carbon transfer-in, and an average of 72%, 80%, and 79% of the sector carbon transfer-out of a province were emitted by three dominant local or non-local industrial sectors, respectively. This study could provide policy implications for local governments to take joint climate mitigation strategies between the demand-side and supply-side targeting high-emitting household consumption behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Production and consumption of goods and services are interlinked through complex global supply-chain networks; so are the greenhouse gas emissions associated with them. Using a model that represents global supply-chain networks, we identified supply-chain clusters with high CO 2 emissions within more than 300 million individual supply chains. We distinguished 4756 significant CO 2 clusters and found that in 2008, global supply-chain networks associated with U.S. transport equipment and construction demand included relatively large CO 2 clusters in China, accounting for 17% and 10%, respectively, of the U.S. CO 2 footprint. Of added importance is the fact that these two clusters in China had annual growth rates of 42% and 58%, respectively, during the period 1995–2008. Our results show the importance for climate policy of monitoring these CO 2 clusters that dominate CO 2 emissions in global supply chains, and they offer insights on where climate policy can be effectively directed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese government is increasingly concerned about the impacts of climate change mitigation policies on social equity. Carbon pricing is an effective measure for reducing carbon emissions, but its distributional effects may exacerbate inequity among different rural and urban households. As a leading carbon pricing pilot area in China, Guangdong Province is the subject area of this paper. By using the environmentally extended input-output model and calculating the Suits index, this study aims to compare the carbon price payments of ten income-level households in Guangdong Province in 2012 and 2017. The results indicate that higher-income households need to pay more for carbon emissions. Total carbon pricing in Guangdong is slightly progressive, and the progressivity increased from 2012 to 2017. Thus, the implementation of carbon pricing may not intensify the inequality between urban and rural areas and between different income groups. Only carbon pricing on residential energy consumption is regressive, which could be compensated by revenue recycling policies. The findings of this study contribute by offering a positive theoretical basis for China's future policies on carbon pricing such as carbon taxes. • Urban households and higher-income households would bear a greater burden of carbon payment in Guangdong. • Carbon pricing will not exacerbate the original income inequality of different households in Guangdong. • Households in urban areas have higher-carbon lifestyles than rural households. • From 2012 to 2017, the progressivity of carbon pricing increased slightly. • Carbon pricing for direct energy consumption is regressive, so revenue recycling schemes are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its NDC, Brazil pledged to reduce its GHG emissions by 43% below 2005 levels in 2030, respectively. Carbon pricing could play a key role in meeting this objective. However, a range of issues can emerge when introducing it. Among these issues, the distributional impact has been frequently highlighted as an obstacle to the public acceptance of such a mitigation policy. This paper examines the short-run welfare and emission effects of an economy-wide carbon tax on Brazilian households. The distributional impact is examined by estimating the tax burden relative to annual expenditures and changes in total GHG emissions across income levels, using tax rates consistent with the Paris Agreement and considering a lump-sum rebate that keeps the government revenue neutral. For this, we calculate energy-related GHG emissions coefficients from fossil fuel burning for the whole household consumption basket, and price and expenditure elasticities which account for the zero-expenditure and underdeclaration problems. Our results indicate that the incidence of the carbon tax is effective in reducing emissions in the short run, but imposes welfare losses, especially on the poor. The consideration of compensation mechanisms is critical when designing this type of environmental tax, specially in the context of a highly complex tax-system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsustainable utilization of solid biomass fuels with inefficient traditional cookstoves has long been a major challenge to ensuring energy and environmental security in Ethiopia. Against the backdrop of this problem, several models of improved biomass cookstoves (ICSs) have been developed and distributed in the country. Yet, little is known about the effect of these ICSs on household's fuelwood consumption and the environment. The aim of this study was to examine the potential woodfuel savings, economic and environmental effects of three ICSs (Mirt, Gonziye, and Tikikil) in rural Ethiopia from a cross-sectional study of 605 sample households and direct energy consumption measurements in four rural districts. Inferential statistics and cost-benefit analysis were used to analyse the data. The results showed that compared with the traditional open fire tripod; the use of ICSs could reduce household's fuelwood consumptions on average by 1.72–2.08 tons per household per year. These fuelwood savings translate to potential emissions reductions of 2.82–3.43 tCO2e per stove per year. The results from the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) indicated that investment in these ICSs could provide a net economic benefit of ETB 7204 to 10,381 (US$ 265 to 382) during the 2–5 years lifespan of the stoves. The benefit-cost ratios of these ICSs were calculated between 16.5:1 and 35.0:1. The implication is that promoting the use of Mirt, Gonziye and Tikikil stoves is a viable option and an essential component of the strategy for improving the energy-efficiency and well-being of rural communities while also contributing to the sustainable utilization of biomass resources, and mitigation of climate change in Ethiopia and beyond. • Improved cookstoves (ICS) reduce fuelwood consumption by 1.72–2.08 tons/year. • ICSs could save emissions of 2.82–3.43 tCO2e per stove per year. • ICSs provide a net economic return of US$ 265 to 382 during 2–5 years lifespan. • ICSs are viable option for improving energy-efficiency and sustainable biomass use. • ICSs should be key element of the climate change mitigation in Ethiopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The impacts of COVID-19 outbreak on CO 2 emission inequality are simulated. • CO 2 emissions inequality under shared socioeconomic pathway scenarios are projected. • The carbon implications of targeted poverty elimination measures are examined. There is increasing interest in CO 2 emissions inequality between and within countries, and concerns about the impacts of COVID-19 on vulnerable groups. In this study, the CO 2 emissions inequality based on the different consumption category data of disaggregated income groups in eight developing countries is analyzed with the application of input-output model. We further examine the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on CO 2 emissions inequality based on the hypothetical extraction method, and the results reveal that the outbreak has decreased the CO 2 emissions inequality and emissions over time. However, the shared socioeconomic pathway scenario simulation results indicate that long-term CO 2 emissions inequality will persist. Targeted poverty elimination measures improve the utility of the low- and lowest-income groups and reduce CO 2 emissions inequality. Reducing the excessive consumption on the demand side as well as improving the energy efficiency and increasing the share of renewable energy in the energy consumption on the supply side will provide more informed options to achieve multiple desirable outcomes, such as poverty elimination and climate change mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. household consumption, a key engine for the global economy, has significant carbon footprints across the world. Understanding how the U.S. household consumption on specific goods or services drives global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is important to guide consumption-side strategies for climate mitigation. Here we examined global GHG emissions driven by the U.S. household consumption from 1995 to 2014 using an environmentally extended multi-regional input-output model and detailed U.S. consumer expenditure survey data. The results show that the annual carbon footprint of the U.S. households ranged from 17.7 to 20.6 tCO 2 eq/capita with an expanding proportion occurring overseas. Housing and transportation contributed 53–66% of the domestic carbon footprint. Overseas carbon footprint shows an overall increasing trajectory, from 16.4% of the total carbon footprint in 1995 to the peak of 20.4% in 2006. These findings provide valuable insights on the scale, distribution, and variations of the global GHG emissions driven by the U.S. household consumption for developing consumption-side strategies in the U.S. for climate mitigation. Unlabelled Image • Multi-regional Input-Output Model is used to quantify carbon footprints from U.S. households between 1995 and 2014. • The annual carbon footprint of the U.S. households ranged from 17.7 to 20.6 tCO 2 eq/capita. • U.S. household carbon footprints expanded around the world, with 16.4-20.4% being outsourced from other countries such China and Canada. • Housing and transportation contributed to 53-66% of the domestic carbon footprint. • Carbon inequity exists in that per capita carbon footprint generally increases with household income, ranging from 12.1 to 28.6 tCO 2 eq/cap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]