Valuing Climate Damages Updating Estimation of the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide (2017) / Chapter Skim
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7 Long-Term Research Needs
7 Long-Term Research Needs
Pages 185-190
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From page 185... ...
The committee structured its work, conclusions, and recommendations around four components of analysis that are involved in estimating the SC-CO2 -- socioeconomic and emissions projections, climate modeling, estimation of climate damages, and discounting net monetary damages -- which are identified as modules. Each module comprises conceptual formulations and theory, computer models and other analytical frameworks, and each is supported by its own specialized disciplinary 1Recognizing that the IWG is itself not a research funding agency, we encourage the IWG to communicate these research priorities to the key research programs of its member agencies, as well as the U.S.
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From page 186... ...
Areas of research that are likely to yield particular benefits include: • Exploration of methods for representing feedbacks among systems and interactions within them, such as: - feedbacks between climate, physical impacts, economic damages, and socioeconomic projections, and - interactions between types of impacts or economic dam ages within and across regions of the world.
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From page 187... ...
CONCLUSION 3-1 Research on key elements of long-term eco nomic and energy models and their inputs, focused on the par ticular needs of socioeconomic projections in SC-CO2 estimation, would contribute to the design and implementation of a new socioeconomic module. Interrelated areas of research that could yield particular benefits include the following, in rough order of priority: • Development of a socioeconomic module to support dam age estimates that depend on interactions within the human climate system (e.g., among energy, water, and agriculture, and between urban emissions and air pollution)
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From page 188... ...
CONCLUSION 4-5 Research focused on improving the repre sentation of the Earth system in the context of coupled climate economic analyses would improve the reliability of estimates of the SC-CO2. In the near term, research in six areas could yield benefits for SC-CO2 estimation: • coordinated research to reduce uncertainty in estimates of the capacity of the land and ocean to absorb and store car bon, especially in the first century after a pulse release, applied to a range of scenarios of future atmospheric com position and temperature; • coordinated Earth system model experiments injecting identical pulses of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in a range of scenarios of future atmospheric composition and temperature; • the development of simple, probabilistic sea level rise mod els that incorporate the emerging science on ice sheet stabil ity and that can be linked to simple Earth system models; • systematic assessments of the dependence of patterns of regional climate change on spatial patterns of forcing, the relationship between regional climate extremes and global mean temperature, the temporal evolution of patterns under conditions of stable or decreasing forcing, and nonlineari ties in the relationship between global means and regional variables;
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From page 189... ...
CONCLUSION 5-1 An expansion of research on climate dam age estimation is needed and would improve the reliability of estimates of the SC-CO2. • In the near term, initial steps that could be undertaken include: - a comprehensive review of the literature on climate impacts and damage estimation, the evaluation of adap tation responses, and regional and sectoral interactions, as well as feedbacks among the damage, socioeconomic, and climate modules; and - comparison of methods for estimating damages, a including characterizations of their differences, syner gies, uncertainties, and treatment of adaptation.
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From page 190... ...
are crossed, and the use of the physical changes in these scenarios to drive models that assess impacts and damages; - empirical observation-based and structural modeling studies of the potential for climate change to drive the crossing of critical thresholds in socioeconomic systems and of their ensuing damages; and - expert elicitation studies of the likelihood of different tipping element scenarios, in order to allow tipping ele ments and their critical thresholds to be represented probabilistically in the SC-CO2 framework. Overall, the committee's long-term recommendations on an integrated approach to estimating the SC-CO2, as well as the socioeconomic, climate, and damages modules, requires a significant advance in the scientific literature.
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