Decoupling global environmental pressure and economic growth: scenarios for energy use, materials use and carbon emissions

By H. Schandl, S. Hatfield-Dodds, T. Wiedmann, Arne Geschke, Yiyong Cai, J. West, D. Newth, T. Baynes, Manfred Lenzen, Anne Owen. 2016

535 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent decades economic growth and increased human wellbeing around the globe have come at the cost of fast growing natural resource use (including materials and energy) and carbon emissions, leading to converging pressures of declining resource security, rising and increasingly volatile natural resource prices, and climate change. We ask whether well-designed policies can reduce global material and energy use, and carbon emissions, with only minimal impacts on improvements in living standards. We use a novel approach of combined economic and environmental modelling to assess the potential for decoupling for 13 world regions and globally. We apply a production (territorial) and consumption approach to discuss regional differences in natural resource use and carbon emissions across three stylized policy outlooks: a reference case with no significant changes to environment and climate policies; a ‘high efficiency’ outlook involving a global carbon price rising from $50 to $236 (constant price) per tonne of CO2 between 2010 and 2050 and improvements in resource efficiency (rising from 1.5% historically to between 3.5% and 4.5% in the scenarios); and a ‘medium efficiency’ outlook midway between the ‘no change’ and ‘high’ outlooks. We find that global energy use will continue to grow rapidly under all three scenarios from 17 billion tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) in 2010 to between 30 and 36 billion toe. Carbon emissions would be considerably lower with a global carbon price, less than half the level of the reference case (29–37 billion tonnes of CO2 instead of 74 billion tonnes) and also material use would grow much more slowly under a carbon price and significant investment to increase resource efficiency (95 instead of 180 billion tonnes of materials). We find that OECD economies have significant potential to reduce their material throughput and carbon emissions with little impact on economic growth, and that developing economies such as China could expand their economies at much lower environmental cost. Globally, the effects of very strong abatement and resource efficiency policies on economic growth and employment until 2050 are negligible. Our study suggests that decarbonization and dematerialization are possible with well-designed policy settings and would not contradict efforts to raise human wellbeing and standards of living. The research demonstrates the usefulness of scenarios for unpacking environmental and economic outcomes of policy alternatives. The findings have important implications for future economic opportunities in a highly resource efficient and low carbon global economy to set human development and achieving the sustainable development goals on a more resilient path.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48431a178eb6dec377b8da9bc32cccc09002682b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. S. Giljum
2. Jason Hickel
3. Md. Mahmudul Alam
4. A. Noman
5. M. W. Murad
6. Asif Razzaq
7. H. Schandl
8. Tim Jackson

In Environmental Engineering

1. S. Giljum
2. F. Krausmann
3. H. Schandl
4. N. Eisenmenger
5. Tim Jackson
6. Arnold Tukker
7. Jason Hickel
8. J. West

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. F. Krausmann
2. S. Giljum
3. N. Eisenmenger
4. H. Schandl
5. Md. Mahmudul Alam
6. A. Noman
7. M. W. Murad
8. Tim Jackson

Citations in the corpus

• Macroeconomic, social and environmental impacts of a circular economy up to 2050: A meta-analysis of prospective studies (2021, background): “The expected global impact of ambitious CESs on CO2 emissions is to reduce emissions between 34.0% and 6.5% (Hatfield-Dodds et al., 2017; Meyer et al., 2015; Schandl et al., 2016).”
• A pathway to circular economy: Developing a conceptual framework for complex value assessment of resources recovered from waste (2017, background): “…take-makeuse-dispose form of resource mismanagement, which depletes our stock of finite resources, causes serious damage to the capacity of our planet to continue to provide a safe habitat (Steffen et al., 2015), and generates continuously increasing amounts of waste (Schandl et al., 2016).”
• The marginal impacts of energy prices on carbon price variations: Evidence from a quantile-on-quantile approach (2021, unknown): “…has further contributed to the investigation of carbon price dynamics and its driven forces from energy markets in 2008-2012 (Phase II) (see, e.g., Aatola et al., 2013; Bredin and Muckley, 2011; Creti et al., 2012; Keppler and Mansanet-Bataller, 2010; Lutz et al., 2013; Schandl et al., 2016).”
• Is Green Growth Possible? (2019, unknown): “In a second study, Schandl et al (2016) use a model based on 3 per cent average annual global GDP growth and explore three scenarios between 2010 and 2050.”
• Material Flow Accounting: Measuring Global Material Use for Sustainable Development (2017, background): “A more elaborate scenario analysis of future global material demand that combined an integrated assessment model (IAM) with a technology-based physical stock and flows model of the global economy projects even stronger growth in global material use (37).”
• Dynamics of technological innovation, energy consumption, energy price and economic growth in Denmark (2018, background): “Policy settings including putting a price on carbon emissions and redirecting investments to infrastructure, production systems and technologies that allow products and services to be delivered at a much lower environmental cost (lower material and energy intensity), are technically achievable and e”