Quantifying the social equity of carbon mitigation strategies

Christian E. Casillas and Daniel M. Kammen

Climate Policy, 2012, vol. 12, issue 6, 690-703

Abstract: Many tools that are helpful for evaluating emissions mitigation measures, such as carbon abatement cost curves, focus exclusively on cost and emissions reduction potential without quantifying the direct and indirect impacts on stakeholders. The impacts of climate change will be the most severe and immediate for billions of poor people, especially for those whose livelihoods are based on agriculture and subsistence activities and are directly dependent on weather patterns. Thus, equity and vulnerability considerations must be central to GHG emissions reduction strategies. A case study of a carbon abatement cost curve for an electricity system in two Nicaraguan rural villages is presented and is complemented with assessments based on the poverty metrics of the poverty headcount, the Gini coefficient, and the Kuznets ratios. Although these metrics are relatively easy to calculate, the study provides a general indication as to how the social impacts of mitigation strategies on the poor (whether they are in rural or urban environments, developed or developing countries) can be revealed and highlights the inequalities that are embedded in them. Further work analysing how mitigation measures affect the various more detailed poverty indices, such as the Human Development, Gender Equality, or Multidimensional Poverty indices, is needed.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14693062.2012.669097 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:tcpoxx:v:12:y:2012:i:6:p:690-703

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tcpo20

DOI: 10.1080/14693062.2012.669097

Access Statistics for this article

Climate Policy is currently edited by Professor Michael Grubb

More articles in Climate Policy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().