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Climate change impacts on emissions and land use scenarios

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Abstract

Scenarios of future emissions and land use have been most commonly produced without accounting for the effects that climate impacts linked to those emissions and land use changes may have. The questions of how important such impacts could be, at the regional or global scale, has become an increasingly cogent one. One prominent example in the last few years has been the critique of high scenarios, whose unabated emissions would create a level of warming so substantial to trigger many detrimental impacts to human and natural systems. So substantial and detrimental to likely hamper economic development, and therefore affect those emissions in a significant feedback loop. Were those impacts represented within multisector dynamics, those high scenarios could experience endogenous curbing of their emission pathways, through damages to GDP, economic development, energy demand. At the other end of the spectrum, low scenarios relying on heavy deployment of land based mitigation solutions, like afforestation or reforestation, do not for example account for the increased risk of wildfires that could limit the effectiveness of those measure. Using the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) we implement climate impacts on water supply, agricultural productivity, and energy demand driven by climatic impact drivers whose evolution over the 21st century is representative of a climate consistent with GCAM’s reference scenario and compare the resulting GCAM output to the reference, unaffected by impacts, at both regional and global scales. We find that under the version of GCAM that uses GDP as an exogenous input, these impacts are not sufficient to bend emission pathways at the global scale, but we do see effects at regional scales on CO2 emissions and other metrics linked to the water, land and energy sectors. We expect the impacts to become more significant at an aggregate, global scale in a forthcoming version of the model with endogenous macroeconomic development (GDP), meanwhile we document the mechanisms that drive the difference at regional scales which could still be significant in their impacts for individual economies and populations.

Category
Strengthening EESM Integrated Modeling Framework – Towards a Digital Earth
Impacts, Tipping Points and Systems Responses and Resilience
Methods in Model Integration, Hierarchical Modeling, Model Complexity
Funding Program Area(s)