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Environ Model Assess (2010) 15:155173 DOI 10.1007/s10666-009-9204-8
Mitigation Costs in a Globalized World: Climate Policy Analysis with REMIND-R
Marian Leimbach Nico Bauer Lavinia Baumstark
Ottmar Edenhofer
Received: 18 July 2008 / Accepted: 10 August 2009 / Published online: 24 October 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract Within this paper, we present the novel hybrid model REMIND-R and its application in a climate policy context based on the EU target to avoid a warming of the Earths atmosphere by more than 2C
compared to the pre-industrial level. This paper aims to identify necessary long-term changes in the energy system and the magnitude of costs to attain such a climate protection target under different designs of the post-2012 climate policy regime. The regional specication of mitigation costs is analyzed in the context of globalization where regions are linked by global markets for emission permits, goods, and several resources. From simulation experiments with REMIND-R, it turns out that quite different strategies of restructuring the energy system are pursued by the regions. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the variance of mitigation costs is higher across regions than across policy regimes. First-order impacts, in particular, reduced rents from trade in fossil resources, prevail regardless of the design of the policy regime.
Keywords Climate policy
Energyeconomyenvironment modeling
Energy system International trade
1 Introduction
Climate change is recognized as a major global threat that the current and the next generations have to deal
M. Leimbach (B) N. Bauer L. Baumstark O. Edenhofer
PIKPotsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, 14412 Potsdam, Germanye-mail: [email protected]
with. Science is asked to provide evidence for climate change, but also to help policy-making by exploring options of adaptation and mitigation. Model-based quantitative analyses are frequently used in climate policy decision-making. A number of energy economyclimate models were developed and applied over the last decadee.g., RICE [30], MERGE [22, 26], MiniCAM [8], IMAGE [1], G-Cubed [25], MESSAGE-MACRO [29], POLES [20], AIM [19], DEMETER [12], MIND [6], FAIR [9], E3MG [2], WITCH [4], Imaclim-R [5]. For an overview, see [36] and [18]. The survey given by [18] indicated that, most recently, major progress was made in modeling endogenous and induced technological change (see also [7, 24]).
The energy sector is a key...