Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 10th Sept 2026, 07:04:50pm CEST (Norway)
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Daily Overview |
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Climate change mitigation and public preferences Location: Lab 1 Session Chair: Brent Sohngen, Ohio State University | |
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Population, Emissions and Climate Change: Integrating IAMs with STIRPAT 1: IVM - Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands, The; 2: Pisa University; 3: Milan University The econometric studies built on the STIRPAT framework clearly show that greenhouse gas emissions respond much more strongly to changes in the population size than to changes in per capita production. Therefore, human population is one the major drivers of carbon emissions but nevertheless its specific role in determining emissions has never been specifically accounted for in the analysis of climate policy. Moreover, since emissions determine carbon concentrations which represent an important source of disutility, population plays a key role in determining the effectiveness of climate policy also through preferences. In order to understand whether and how the dependence of emissions on the population size affects our conclusions regarding mitigation, we integrate a global integrated assessment model of climate-economy with the STIRPAT formulation. In particular, we allow population to act as an independent factor affecting emissions in a non-proportional manner and utility to negatively depend on carbon concentrations. In this setting, we show that emissions, the temperature increase and the cost of climate mitigation are all much larger than what traditionally believed, and thus more abatement efforts and earlier interventions are needed in order to effectively reduce the economic impacts of climate change. Therefore, by underestimating the detrimental environmental consequences of anthropogenic activity, extant literature provides a substantially biased analysis of the importance of climate policy, which instead requires more costly and urgent mitigation measures to achieve the mid-of-century objectives set by international climate agreements | |