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Balancing China’s climate damage risk against emission control costs

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Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this study, we incorporate a three-reservoir climate module into our energy-economy-environmental integrated (3E-integrated) system model, in order to estimate the effect of China’s contribution of unilateral emissions on global warming and to weigh the macro-mitigation cost against the risk of damage, and we also explore the role of adaptation in reducing climate change risk. Our results suggest that China’s unilateral emission-control action plays a relatively limited role in mitigating global warming and is not particularly cost-effective, given that the macro-reduction cost is much larger than the benefit in the corresponding climate damage mitigation. Adaptation plays a large role in curbing China’s climate damages and improving the economics of China’s unilateral emission-control actions, and it is little affected by the introduction and option mitigation strategies. To prevent global warming from exceeding critical thresholds, more international collaborations and cooperative efforts are therefore anxiously needed; as for China, bolstering a low-carbon economy and installing an effective mechanism for improving the adaptation level are two feasible options for controlling climate damage risks, given the great uncertainty on the present situation of international cooperation mitigation.

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Notes

  1. Raupach et al. (2014) also give allocation plans under the 2.5 and 3 °C targets, for which the corresponding available quota of emissions for China will be much larger; however, these are beyond the scope of our research.

  2. BAU means business-as-usual, which is a scenario without taking any mitigation or adaptation actions into account, and provides reference results for policy scenarios.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the financial supports from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71503242, 71402175) and the Ministry of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Fund Project (No. 14YJC630029).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Hongbo Duan & Shouyang Wang

  2. School of Public Policy and Management, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Gupeng Zhang

  3. Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Shouyang Wang

  4. School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Ying Fan

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  1. Hongbo Duan
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  2. Gupeng Zhang
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  4. Ying Fan
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Correspondence to Gupeng Zhang.

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Duan, H., Zhang, G., Wang, S. et al. Balancing China’s climate damage risk against emission control costs. Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change 23, 387–403 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-017-9739-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11027-017-9739-y

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