Conference Agenda

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies are increasingly recognized as crucial for meeting climate targets, yet their anticipated future deployment may reduce mitigation efforts today. This paper presents a tractable two-generation model to analyze the intergenerational dynamics of CDR and emissions abatement. The model incorporates uncertainty in both CDR costs and climate damages while maintaining analytical tractability, focusing on a present generation choosing abatement levels and a future generation determining CDR deployment. It reproduces key findings from more complex dynamic models and allows to demonstrate that systematic biases -- such as a present bias, or the underestimation of CDR costs or climate damages -- lead to suboptimally low abatement. The model provides a good starting point for future research on the complex interactions between CDR expectations, current mitigation efforts, and climate policy.

Linkages between climate change and biodiversity do exist (Ramsar, 1973). For instance, on the one hand, climate change affects the hydrological cycle which in turn impacts wetlands. On the other hand, wetlands are critical to mitigating climate change. In this paper, we stress the importance of considering simultaneously the issues of climate change and of biodiversity. We provide a long term analysis of optimal pollution control by considering the social planner problem of a polluting country. In order to properly capture the linkages between climate change and biodiversity, we explicitly account for (i) the effect of biodiversity on the natural assimilation of GHG and ii) the effect of GHG concentration on the biodiversity dynamics. We then appraise whether applying this framework affects the existing long run scenarios for the evolution of GHG concentration. Our results stress that policies derived under wrong scenarios are not only suboptimal but lead to dramatic situations for GHG concentration. Therefore they suggest (i) to call for better information on GHG concentration dynamics and in particular on the effect of biodiversity on these dynamics in order to build better scenarios for GHG concentration dynamics and (ii) to focus on biodiversity issues to mitigate climate change.

Biochar is a promising climate mitigation measure that can safely capture and store atmospheric carbon dioxide in soil for many years. In addition to the soil carbon stock enhancement, biochar may have positive effects on crop productivity and fertilizer use. The magnitude of these effects is still uncertain, but they are typically less pronounced in the boreal climate and may change with changing climate. We conduct an economic analysis to assess the economic feasibility of increasing Finnish mineral agricultural soil carbon stock with biochar in an increasingly dry and warm climate scenario. The Monte Carlo simulations showed that it is challenging to achieve economic feasibility with current carbon prices and biochar costs. To make biochar application economically feasible with a carbon subsidy at the level of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) carbon price of 88 EUR/t CO₂eq, the cost of biochar material would need to be reduced to less than one-third of its current average price. Alternatively, economic viability could be achieved if the subsidy paid to the farmers was between two to nine times larger than the EU ETS carbon price for the current range of biochar market prices. Lastly, the feasibility can be achieved by simultaneous doubling of the carbon price and halving average biochar cost. Currently, the biochar market is thin and a decrease in biochar cost level is needed to make biochar competitive with other climate change mitigation measures.