Impact of population growth and population ethics on climate change mitigation policy.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Noah ScovronickFabian Wagner

Abstract

Future population growth is uncertain and matters for climate policy: higher growth entails more emissions and means more people will be vulnerable to climate-related impacts. We show that how future population is valued importantly determines mitigation decisions. Using the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, we explore two approaches to valuing population: a discounted version of total utilitarianism (TU), which considers total wellbeing and is standard in social cost of carbon dioxide (SCC) models, and of average utilitarianism (AU), which ignores population size and sums only each time period's discounted average wellbeing. Under both approaches, as population increases the SCC increases, but optimal peak temperature decreases. The effect is larger under TU, because it responds to the fact that a larger population means climate change hurts more people: for example, in 2025, assuming the United Nations (UN)-high rather than UN-low population scenario entails an increase in the SCC of 85% under TU vs. 5% under AU. The difference in the SCC between the two population scenarios under TU is comparable to commonly debated decisions regarding time discounting. Additionally, we estimate the avoided mitigation costs implied b...Continue Reading

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Citations

Nov 3, 2017·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Wolfgang Lutz
May 9, 2019·Nature Communications·Noah ScovronickFabian Wagner
Aug 26, 2018·Environmental Science and Pollution Research International·Claudia Nyarko MensahMuhammed Salman
Apr 9, 2020·Frontiers in Endocrinology·Sarah HaniehJohn Boulton
Mar 17, 2021·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Wolfgang LutzDilek Yildiz
Aug 24, 2021·The Journal of Development Studies·Mark Budolfson, Dean Spears

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