CMCC and the Princeton Environmental Institute – Princeton University share a common vision of developing measurement and modeling tools which support improved understanding and prediction of climate change and using such tools to assess the possible impacts of climate change and climate change policy on ecosystems and human society.
12 months from 01/10/2008 to 31/10/2009
General aims
CMCC and PEI (Princeton Environmental Institute – Princeton University) share a common vision of developing measurement and modeling tools which support improved understanding and prediction of climate change and using such tools to assess the possible impacts of climate change and climate change policy on ecosystems and human society.
Therefore, in the framework of this cooperative project, PEI and CMCC plan to work on completing the concept of Stabilization Wedges, as developed by Pacala and Socolow (2004), by adding some economic information.
CMCC Role
The CMCC and PEI will work jointly, by exchanging information on research activities and publications related to climate change and may also meet once a year to discuss ongoing projects, joint initiatives, and planning of new projects.Within the cooperative project, the research group will follow two line of actions: Complementing and ordering wedges (WP1) and Matching wedges and IAM models (WP2).
Expected results
- An economic characterisation of wedges, by the quantification of their costs and by computing the implications of their introduction for the whole world economic system. In particular, using this approach, it will be possible to consider the cost of diffusion for each wedge, the financial resources that are necessary, the crowding out effects that this generates, the macroeconomic impacts on growth and trade, etc.
- A workshop focused on the scientific results of the OSW project.
Activity
Within WP1, as a preliminary process, the original wedges list will be extended to include technological options which were omitted from the original analysis. The processes of innovation and technological substitution are part of a dynamic and an complex system and wedges might interact one with the other (for example technologies might compete for the use of the same resource). This complex interactions should be discussed in detailed in this introductory phase. The remaining of the first workpackage will be devoted to enrich the wedge idea with additional information on economic, environmental and social indicators and to use such information to generate an economic and technical ranking of various mitigation options for different countries of the world.
Within WP2, the second part of the project aims at reconciling the intuitiveness and simplicity of the wedge approach with the complexity of more structural approaches to the mitigation problem as those that pertain to the integrated assessment modelling (IAM) literature.
Partners
- CMCC - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change
- Princeton University