Transitions in pathways of human development and carbon emissions

By W. Lamb, J. Steinberger, A. Bows-Larkin, G. P. Peters, J. Roberts, F. Wood. 2013

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Countries are known to follow diverse pathways of life expectancy and carbon emissions, but little is known about factors driving these dynamics. In this letter we estimate the cross-sectional economic, demographic and geographic drivers of consumption-based carbon emissions. Using clustering techniques, countries are grouped according to their drivers, and analysed with respect to a criteria of one tonne of carbon emissions per capita and a life expectancy over 70 years (Goldemberg’s Corner). Five clusters of countries are identified with distinct drivers and highly differentiated outcomes of life expectancy and carbon emissions. Representatives from four clusters intersect within Goldemberg’s Corner, suggesting diverse combinations of drivers may still lead to sustainable outcomes, presenting many countries with an opportunity to follow a pathway towards low-carbon human development. By contrast, within Goldemberg’s Corner, there are no countries from the core, wealthy consuming nations. These results reaffirm the need to address economic inequalities within international agreements for climate mitigation, but acknowledge plausible and accessible examples of low-carbon human development for countries that share similar underlying drivers of carbon emissions. In addition, we note differences in drivers between models of territorial and consumption-based carbon emissions, and discuss interesting exceptions to the drivers-based cluster analysis.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36c9a197b0fcb39e541d0720ad21d38e97f2eb1a

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Citations in the corpus

Economic Growth and Climate Change: A Cross-National Analysis of Territorial and Consumption-Based Carbon Emissions in High-Income Countries (2014, background): “[22] uncovered differences in contributions to territorial and consumption-based emissions, with economic development and exports exhibiting more strongly significant effects on the latter in a cross-sectional regression analysis.”
Income Inequality and Carbon Emissions in the United States: A State-level Analysis, 1997–2012 (2017, background): “Consistent with past research on anthropogenic emissions (Dietz, 2015; Jorgenson and Clark, 2012; Lamb et al., 2014; Rosa and Dietz, 2012; York et al., 2003), we anticipate that both population size and GDP per capitawill exhibit positive effects of state-level CO2 emissions.”
Wealth Inequality and Carbon Emissions in High-income Countries (2017, result): “Our use of these data is consistent with prior cross-national research in environmental social science (Jorgenson et al. 2016; Knight and Schor 2014; Lamb et al. 2014).”
The sustainable development oxymoron: quantifying and modelling the incompatibility of sustainable development goals (2016, unknown): “…some of the theoretical ideas on sustainable development put forward, for instance, by Dasgupta (2013) (see next section) but also other recent research that suggests that human well-being can be decoupled from GDP per capita and environmental exploitation (Dietz et al. 2009; Lamb et al. 2014).”
Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario (2020, background): “widespread sanitation services) and achieve some social outcomes (life expectancy) with low emissions per capita (Lamb et al., 2014), it’s rare to find countries achieving good social outcomes across the board with relatively low emissions (Lamb, 2016).”
Does financial development asymmetrically affect CO2 emissions in China? An application of the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model (2018, background): “Recently, to some extent the alarming effects of such massive utilization of energy have been realized, particularly by emerging and highly industrialized economies, and several scientific projects have been initiated as a strategy to protect the environment and reduce CO2 emissions [27].”
The impact of population density, energy consumption, economic growth and trade openness on CO2 emissions in India (2015, methodology): “A growing body of scientific research on the causes and consequences of climate change has warranted for immediate and sustained reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nations (Lamb et al. 2014).”