Abstract
A key issue in climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is how future commitments can be differentiated amongst countries. This thesis focuses on a more systematic differentiation of such commitments to support international decision making in this respect. Bottom-up information on reduction opportunities is
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taken into account, as well as the stabilization objective and most of the basic principles of the UNFCCC.
The thesis starts from the Triptych approach to the differentiation of commitments. This is a sector- and technology-oriented approach that takes into account various national circumstances to calculate emission targets. It played an important role in the differentiation of the European Union's Kyoto target over its Member States. The approach was upscaled to calculate emission targets at the global level and to identify characteristics of the approach that would need further consideration.
One of the outcomes of this exercise was the importance of valueladen choices and uncertainties in the approach. Therefore an assessment was made of the ranges in emission reduction targets that result from valueloading and uncertainty in input data and parameters. A modified version of Cultural Theory and Monte Carlo simulations were used as complementary methods to do so. An important finding was that notwithstanding valueloading and uncertainty the ranking of countries within the calculated differentiation of commitments remains roughly the same. This demonstrates that the Triptych approach is a robust tool for dealing with the issue of differentiation of commitments.
A major factor affecting the resulting emission targets appeared to be growth assumptions for the energy-intensive industry. Therefore development trajectories of the energy-intensive industry in various regions of the world in the 1980s and 1990s were studied. On the basis of recent per capita growth rates in this sector, rough aggregate growth rates of industrial production per capita for the coming decades were projected: these were around 6% for the 'lower low' income countries, 3-4% for the upper low', 1% for the middle-income and 0.5% for the high-income countries.
The presumed rates of energy efficiency improvement turned out to be another factor influencing the outcome of the original Triptych approach. Therefore an assessment was made of international differences in energy efficiency in the energy-intensive industry. Data on energy efficiency were summarized in aggregated values for the Energy Efficiency Index in each world region. For some regions this aggregated EEI may be up to twice the current reference level (best practice), whereas for other regions this factor is not higher than 1.2. The concept of a technological convergence was suggested to estimate the effect of differences in energy efficiency on the differentiation of emission objectives.
Finally an adjusted approach to the differentiation of commitments is presented, named the Global Triptych approach. The approach starts from three convergence trajectories in each of the energy-consuming sectors: convergence of energy efficiency in the energy-intensive industry, convergence of greenhouse gas intensity of electricity production and convergence of per capita emissions in the domestic sectors, which comprise the remainder of fossil fuel related emissions. For each of these variables global long-term sustainability targets for the year 2050 were defined based on bottom-up information on emission reduction opportunities. Calculated emission limitation objectives for the year 2020 compared to 1995 emissions ranged from –30% to more than 200% over all world regions. Meeting such objectives would seem to maintain the long-term possibility of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations at about 550 ppm CO2-eq. It was concluded that within the approach various basic principles and the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC could be accommodated. These could be upheld in particular because bottom-up information on reduction opportunities had been incorporated.
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