Sharing the Burdens of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation: Incorporating Fairness Perspectives into Policy Optimization Models

Piotr Żebrowski, Ulf Dieckmann, Åke Brännström, Oskar Franklin and Elena Rovenskaya
Additional contact information
Piotr Żebrowski: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Ulf Dieckmann: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Åke Brännström: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Oskar Franklin: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Elena Rovenskaya: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 7, 1-24

Abstract: Mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change can be addressed only through the collective action of multiple agents. The engagement of involved agents critically depends on their perception that the burdens and benefits of collective action are distributed fairly. Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), which inform climate policies, focus on the minimization of costs and the maximization of overall utility, but they rarely pay sufficient attention to how costs and benefits are distributed among agents. Consequently, some agents may perceive the resultant model-based policy recommendations as unfair. In this paper, we propose how to adjust the objectives optimized within IAMs so as to derive policy recommendations that can plausibly be presented to agents as fair. We review approaches to aggregating the utilities of multiple agents into fairness-relevant social rankings of outcomes, analyze features of these rankings, and associate with them collections of properties that a model’s objective function must have to operationalize each of these rankings within the model. Moreover, for each considered ranking, we propose a selection of specific objective functions that can conveniently be used for generating this ranking in a model. Maximizing these objective functions within existing IAMs allows exploring and identifying climate polices to which multiple agents may be willing to commit.

Keywords: burden sharing; fairness; Pareto optimality; aggregating functions; policy optimization models; multi-objective optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/7/3737/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/7/3737/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:7:p:3737-:d:777125

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().