WP3: Health and Environmental Impacts of Climate Change and Ancillary Benefits

Objectives

To find better ways of anchoring energy and climate models inside a complex natural environment.
To improve understanding of environmental and health impacts of climate change and emission-reductions.
To explore interlinkages between energy, water, and food systems, their supply and co-moving prices.
To develop circular economy foundations for climate and energy related material flows.

Task 1: Climate change impacts

This task reflects the anchoring of energy and climate processes in a natural environment. It deals with the valuation of the market and non-market effects of climate change, in particular impacts on land use, and ecosystem amenities. We also investigate the economics of extreme events related to climate change such as hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, heavy snow and hail and climate change tipping points. Statistical techniques dealing with the tails of the distribution are applied to extreme energy market events like price spikes. Fundamental statistical expertise and connection with natural sciences are important in this task.

Task 2: Environmental health

We focus on climate change impacts on human health and on transferability of monetary values for changes in the quality of natural ecosystems. We pay special attention to health impacts in China. We also examine valuations of health effects caused by energy- and emission-reduction activities, such as increasing physical activity (walking and biking substituting for car driving), changing diets and other lifestyle changes. Health economists and relevant medical experts contribute to this task.

Task 3: Energy – water – food nexus

This task investigates climate change and energy transition impacts on three interlinked supply securities of energy, water and food, and the co-movement of their prices. Agricultural and water management experts combine their approach with energy specialists in his task.

Task 4: Circular economy and footprints

This task deals with the paradigm change of moving from linear to a circular use of natural resources, including both economic production and consumption in wide ecological systems. It relies on life-cycle assessment and multi-regional environmentally-extended input-output modelling to quantify total consumption footprints (including the environmental burden embodied in international trade) on the environment (emissions, land use, water use, ecosystems). Linking this evaluation tool to household consumption data allows us to analyse the footprints of various household segments. This is one of the most interdisciplinary tasks of the GEOCEP project, closely connecting environmental sciences and engineering with behavioural sciences and economics.

Results published

Janda, Karel, Peter Kravec. 2022. ‘VECM Modelling of the Price Dynamics for Fuels, Agricultural Commodities and Biofuels.’ Working paper. Kiel: Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.