Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

To address the climate change issue, three main strategies may be used: mitigation, adaptation, and climate geoengineering. Mitigation aims to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, in particular carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, e.g., using energy savings or cleaner energy sources. Likewise, CO2 removal strategies, such as the use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, seek to reduce CO2 atmospheric levels. Rather than reducing GHG levels, adaptation measures aim to adjust economic or social structures to limit the impact of climate change, without limiting climate change itself. Given the risk of dangerous climate changes, a third option would be climate geoengineering, such as solar radiation management that seeks to reduce incoming solar radiation. But such measures could have unexpected and adverse side effects. To study the respective role each strategy could play when addressing climate change, one may rely on integrated assessment, an interdisciplinary approach that combines socio-economic elements with geophysical and environmental elements. This assessment can be performed using an integrated assessment model (IAM), but very few IAMs explicitly represent all three climate strategies. Besides, IAMs typically distinguish among several world regions, but few explicitly represent Canada. This research will develop an IAM that models Canada as a stand-alone region and can study the interplay of all three climate strategies in dealing with the climate change issue. In particular, this new IAM will be used to analyze the impacts investing in adaptation may have on the decarbonization rate of energy systems, and whether climate geoengineering could offer recourse when approaching a dangerous tipping point in the climate system. When performing these analyses, a special attention will be given to the modeling of the many uncertainties related, e.g., to adaptation effectiveness, technological progress in clean energy systems, and the proximity of critical thresholds in the Earth system. To translate climate policies developed with a world IAM at a regional level, one may use a regional E3 (economy / energy / environment) model. E3 models usually propose a more detailed representation of regional economies and energy systems, but in terms of environment, E3 models only calculate GHG emissions without measuring their climatic impacts. This research will enhance two existing E3 models, one for the different Canadian provinces and territories, the other one for the Greater Montreal region, to provide specific regional climate policy insights to Canadian decision makers.