M. Gusti

EU Energy, Transport and GHG Emissions: Trends to 2050, Reference Scenario 2013

This report is an update and extension of the previous trend scenarios for development of energy systems taking account of transport and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions developments. The purpose of this publication is to present the new European Union (EU) Reference scenario 2013. It focuses on energy, transport and climate dimensions of EU developments and the various interactions among policies, including specific sections on emission trends not related to energy. The Reference scenario was elaborated by a consortium led by the National Technical University of Athens (E3MLab) using the PRIMES model for energy and CO2 emission projections, the GAINS model for non-CO2 emission projections and the GLOBIOM-G4M models for LULUCF emission and removal projections. The scenarios are available for the EU and each of its 28 Member States simulating the energy balances and GHG emission trends for future years under current trends and policies as adopted in the Member States by spring 2012.

Projection of the future EU forest CO2 sink as affected by recent bioenergy policies using two advanced forest management models

Forests of the European Union (EU) have been intensively managed for decades, and they have formed a significant sink for carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere over the past 50 years. The reasons for this behavior are multiple, among them are: forest aging, area expansion, increasing plant productivity due to environmental changes of many kinds, and, most importantly, the growth rates of European forest having been higher than harvest rates. EU countries have agreed to reduce total emissions of GHG by 20% in 2020 compared to 1990, excluding the forest sink.

Spatial GHG Inventory: Analysis of Uncertainty Sources. A Case Study for Ukraine

A geoinformation technology for creating spatially distributed greenhouse gas inventories based on a methodology provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and special software linking input data, inventory models, and a means for visualization are proposed. This technology opens up new possibilities for qualitative and quantitative spatially distributed presentations of inventory uncertainty at the regional level. Problems concerning uncertainty and verification of the distributed inventory are discussed. A Monte Carlo analysis of uncertainties in the energy sector at the regional level is performed, and a number of simulations concerning the effectiveness of uncertainty reduction in some regions are carried out. Uncertainties in activity data have a considerable influence on overall inventory uncertainty, for example, the inventory uncertainty in the energy sector declines from 3.2 to 2.0% when the uncertainty of energy-related statistical data on fuels combusted in the energy industries declines from 10 to 5%. Within the energy sector, the ‘energy industries’ subsector has the greatest impact on inventory uncertainty. The relative uncertainty in the energy sector inventory can be reduced from 2.19 to 1.47% if the uncertainty of specific statistical data on fuel consumption decreases from 10 to 5%. The ‘energy industries’ subsector has the greatest influence in the Donetsk oblast. Reducing the uncertainty of statistical data on electricity generation in just three regions — the Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Luhansk oblasts — from 7.5 to 4.0% results in a decline from 2.6 to 1.6% in the uncertainty in the national energy sector inventory.

Climate Change Impacts and Mitigation in the Developing World: An Integrated Assessment of the Agriculture and Forestry Sectors

This paper conducts an integrated assessment of climate change impacts and climate mitigation on agricultural commodity markets and food availability in low- and middle-income countries. The analysis uses the partial equilibrium model GLOBIOM to generate scenarios to 2080. The findings show that climate change effects on the agricultural sector will increase progressively over the century. By 2030, the impact of climate change on food consumption is moderate but already twice as large in a world with high inequalities than in a more equal world. In the long run, impacts could be much stronger, with global average calorie losses of 6 percent by 2050 and 14 percent by 2080. A mitigation policy to stabilize climate below 2°C uniformly applied to all regions as a carbon tax would also result in a 6 percent reduction in food availability by 2050 and 12 percent reduction by 2080 compared to the reference scenario. To avoid more severe impacts of climate change mitigation on development than climate change itself, revenue from carbon pricing policies will need to be redistributed appropriately. Overall, the projected effects of climate change and mitigation on agricultural markets raise important issues for food security in the long run, but remain more limited in the medium term horizon of 2030. Thus, there are opportunities for low- and middle-income countries to pursue immediate development needs and thus prepare for later periods when adaptation needs and mitigation efforts will become the greatest.

Spatially explicit assessment of roundwood and logging residues availability and costs for the EU28

ABSTRACT Competition for woody biomass between material and energy uses is expected to further increase in the future, due to the limited availability of forest resources and increasing demand of wood for material and bioenergy. Currently, methodological approaches for modeling wood production and delivery costs from forest to industrial gates are missing. This study combines forest engineering, geographically explicit information, environmental constraints and economics in a bottom-up approach to assess cost–supply curves. The estimates are based on a multitude of wood supply systems that were assigned according to geographically explicit forestry characteristics. For each harvesting and transportation system, efficiencies were modeled according to harvesting sites and main delivery hubs. The cost–supply curves for roundwood and logging residues as estimates for current time and for the future (2030) show that there are large regional differences in the potential to increase extraction in the EU28. In most EU Member States, the costs of logging residues extraction increase exponentially already for low levels of mobilization, while extraction of roundwood can be increased to a larger extent within reasonable costs (30–40 

Uncertainties in greenhouse gases inventories – expanding our perspective

/m3). The large differences between countries in their harvest potential highlight the importance of spatially explicit analyses.

Spatial Inventory of Greenhouse Gases on Regional Level

Strategies for mitigating global climate change require accurate estimates of the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). A strong consensus in the global scientific community states that efforts to control climate change require stabilization of the atmospheric concentration of GHGs (as per a recent compilation; (IPCC 2013)). Estimates of the amounts of carbon dioxide and other GHGs emitted to the atmosphere, as well as the amounts absorbed by terrestrial and aquatic systems, are crucial for planning, analyzing, validating and at global scale verifying mitigation efforts and for analyzing scenarios of future emissions. The magnitude and distribution of current emissions and the path of future emissions are both of considerable importance. It is critical that we have estimates of emissions and that we acknowledge and deal with the uncertainty in our best estimates. The range of issues that derive from uncertainty in emissions estimates was the subject of the 3 rd International Uncertainty Workshop held in Lviv, Ukraine, 2010, and is the subject of this special issue. Resolving national or regional contributions to changes in atmospheric GHG concentrations involves international agreements and national inventories of emissions. Countries, cities, companies, and individuals are now commonly calculating their GHG emissions, and markets

Accounting for institutional quality in global forest modeling

The principals of spatial inventory of greenhouse gases on regional level which are based on IPCC methodologies and digital maps are considered. Mathematical models for spatial inventory using elementary plots are proposed. A geoinformation approach for creation of thematic maps of greenhouse gas emissions in MapInfo format is developed. The mechanism is illustrated on example of Energy sector of Lviv Region of Ukraine.

Forest Resource Projection Tools at the European Level

Abstract The current state of the art in modeling forest cover change is to combine a detailed representation of biophysical processes with economic decision-making principles. Yet, there is an increasing consensus that the quality of political institutions is another relevant component in determining forest cover change patterns. In this paper, the Global Forest Model is used to analyze whether including an index, measuring the capacity of political institutions to guarantee sustainable natural resource management, allows to improve the precision of the modeled forest cover trend. The analysis shows that incorporating the index indeed allows reducing the gap between the estimated and observed forest cover trends for the 2000 to 2010 calibration period.

The benefits of investing into improved carbon flux monitoring

Many countries have developed their own systems for projecting forest resources and wood availability. Although studies using these tools are helpful for developing national policies, they do not provide a consistent assessment for larger regions such as the European Union or Europe as a whole. Individual national-scale studies differ considerably in timing, underlying methodology and scenarios, and reports are not issued for all countries in the region. However, a clear demand for consistent projections at European scale still remains. This chapter describes the resource simulators and forest sector models EFISCEN, EFDM, CBM-CFS3, and GLOBIOM/G4M that can all be applied to individual European countries, as well as to Europe as a whole.