A Scheme for Jointly Trading off Costs and Risks of Solar Radiation Management and Mitigation Under Long-Tailed Climate Sensitivity Probability Density Distributions

Artikel

Side effects of "solar-radiation management" (SRM) might be perceived as an important metric when society decides on implementing SRM as a climate policy option to alleviate anthropogenic global warming. We generalize cost-risk analysis that originally trades off expected welfare loss from climate policy costs and risks from transgressing climate targets to also include risks from applying SRM. In a first step of acknowledging SRM risks, we represent global precipitation mismatch as a prominent side effect of SRM under long-tailed probabilistic knowledge about climate sensitivity. We maximize a social welfare function for the following three scenarios, considering alternative relative weights of risks: temperature-risk-only, precipitation-risk-only, and equally-weighted both-risks. Our analysis shows that in the temperature-risk-only scenario, perfect compliance with the 2 °C-temperature target is attained for all numerically represented climate sensitivities, a unique feature of SRM, but the 2 °C-compatible precipitation corridor is violated. The precipitation-risk-only scenario exhibits an approximate mirror-image of this result. In addition, under the both-risks scenario, almost 90% and perfect compliance can be achieved for the temperature and precipitation targets, respectively. Moreover, in a mitigation-only analysis, the welfare loss from mitigation cost plus residual climate risks, compared to the no-climate-policy option, is approximately 4.3% (in terms of balanced growth equivalent), while being reduced more than 90% under a joint-mitigation-SRM analysis.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: Environmental Modeling & Assessment ; ISSN: 1573-2967 ; Volume: 26 ; Year: 2021 ; Issue: 5 ; Pages: 823-836 ; Cham: Springer International Publishing

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Hausbau, Bauhandwerk
• Subject: Climate targets ; Cost-risk analysis ; Decision making under uncertainty ; Mitigation ; Solar-radiation management

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Roshan, Elnaz ; Khabbazan, Mohammad M. ; Held, Hermann
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Springer International Publishing
• (where): Cham
• (when): 2021

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.1007/s10666-021-09778-2
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET