M4 Flashcards
What is ‘the economy’?
The system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made
and used.
A set of processes that involves its
culture, values, education, technological
evolution, history, social organization, political
structure, legal systems, and natural resources as main factors.
What kind of decoupling has the EU seen?
carbon footprint fell by 22%, even as the economy grew by 58% (issues with territorial carbon counting as well; EU as a whole has higher carbon footprint). This is relative decoupling.
How much chance do we have of staying below 1.5 degrees according to IPCC?
A 66% chance
How much carbon budget do we have according to IPCC?
420Gt co2
What is the average rate of co2 decline atm?
Less than 1%
What happens to decoupling when the economy grows?
The larger the economy becomes, the more dificult to decouple it.
Why do unregulated markets overproduce CO2?
Because the CO2 costs are not calculated into the transactions
What is a market failure?
when markets do not maximise society’s welfare; outcome is not pareto efficient (optimised)
OR mismatch between private + social costs/benefits
is climate change a market failure?
yes
What contributes to the climate change market failure?
No solution for the GHG externality; only ethical incentive for businesses right now
What are common solutions to the climate change market failure?
higher prices on carbon emissions, low carbon tech
What are other climate-related externalities?
Lack of information on how to reduce emissions, network effects, lack of innovation incentives, animal abuse
What do households give to businesses?
labour and knowledge
What do companies give to households?
goods and services
what do companies and households give to government?
taxes
what does government give to companies and households?
wages or consumption, infrastructure, institutions, other services
Imperfect markets are…
- monopolies
- info-asymmetry
- externalities
- assumption of homo economicus
- tragedy of the commons
Ultimate ends (daly triangle)
Wellbeing
Intermediate ends (daly triangle)
human capital and social capital
intermediate means (daly triangle)
built and human capital
ultimate means (daly triangle)
natural capital
tech progress can overcome poverty, can grow within planetary boundaries
smithian/tech optimism
ideology that says that we need to scale down and adhere to the planetary boundaries; in the long run the econmy will be at a steady state, poor people need to invest in having children
malthusian pessimism
How to calculate the market equilibrium
MPB = MSB = MPC
Marginal social cost > marginal private cost
Negative externalities
Marginal private benefits > marginal social benefits
Positive externalities
Are categories of environmental problems difficult to quantify cost-wise?
Yes!
Why would we focus on consumption in environmental issues?
Improving supply is too limited
Consumption solutions are ready and do not require investment
Consumption tackles responsibility issues
Hypothesis that suggests that environmental degradation worsens at the beginning of economic growth but gets better after a certain (bell curve) turning point.
Environmental kuznets curve hypothesis
What are 3 core degrowth values
autonomy, sufficiency, care
flow of products + the actors involved at each stage and value that these actors add
value chain
production, processing, distribution, retail processes that might happen before something gets to be the final product
supply chain
need to stay above this minimum resource use threshold (i.e. the ‘social foundation’) and below theenvironmental ceiling (as defined by the planetary boundaries concept)
doughnut economics (stay inside the filling of the donut)
Why could there be a food shortage?
inflation, war/conflict, concentrated markets for food industry, energy and fertiliser crisis, water crisis,
what to do against food shortage?
provide international assistence (emergency), support national social systems, strengthen food systems.
What crops are already seeing yield reduction?
soy, general, maize,
Are agricultural pests spreading?
Yes!
Do big farms get a lot of subsidy?
Yes!
What (4) is necessary for the food transition?
dietary change
reduce food waste
improve food production
save land for biodiversity/carbon sink
difficulties with food research
uncertainties, different data, different models, hard to judge if solutions have worked, for how long
Process of LED lights (red and blue), ovening plants, light, evaporation, temperature valves used to control plant output
indoor plant farming
nutritious, -95% water, no pesticides, affordable (eventually), local jobs, no waste, longer shelf life, resilient plants, less energy, labour and operational costs
selling points of indoor farming
issues with indoor farming
too high tech for global south
formal exercises aimed at engaging stakeholders to find out how important specific environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues are to them.
Materiality assessments
natural assets in their role of providing natural resource inputs and environmental services for economic production.
natural capital
A business approach in which a company puts back more into society, the environment and the global economy than it takes out.
net positive
What are the four steps of the conservation mitigation hierarchy?
refrain, reduce, restore, renew
refrain example (conservation)
e.g. mitigation: retain important biodiversity in development sites
e.g. conservation: proactively protect nature sites
Reduce example (conservation)
e.g. mitigation: best practices for industries to produce
e.g. conservation: proactive forest/indigenous peoples protection
Restore example (conservation)
e.g. mitigation: replanting and restocking areas
e.g. conservation: restore degraded areas of production
what sector is going through the largest increase in energy use?
consumption-sector
circular economy charactersitics
- non linear supply chain
- output of one process is the input of another
- resources not exploited or wasted
- dougnut economics: planetary boundaries
circular economy solutions
- residual waste management
- closing supply chains
- product lifetime extension
- resource efficiency
Important to think about for CE projections
assumptions, time, impact/indicator, explore what-ifs
key domains of consumption emissions
- housing and shelter
- mobility
- food
input-output analysis
good to use
is linear modelling acceptable?
Yes, but doesnt include fluctuating things that are more complex like education or gender or anything like that.
Long-term vs short-term
Quant vs qual
Regional vs global
Forecasting vs backcasting
Scenario vs storyline
Baseline vs transition
Questions you can ask yourself while projecting or making scenarios.
Objectives of IAM (integrated assessment modelling)
Large-scale and long-term interactions between humand and earth system globally
Assessing/exploring mitigation and adaptation options based on these global findings
How much of household water usage is hidden?
95%
Ecological credit/debt
When a country has a lower/higher footprint than its biocapacity
What would no decoupling mean?
a linear, one-to-one relationship
What are the economic valuation methods for nature (cost/benefit analysis)?
Direct use values: resource extraction
Passive values: ecosystem services.
LCA scale
micro-scale
LCA steps
1 goal, scope, definition
2 inventory analysis, data collection
3 impact assessment
4 interpretation
defining system boundary (where, what), gate to gate vs cradle to gate vs cradle to grave, functional unit
LCA step 1
data collection, modelling, economic allocation (allocate revenue), mass allocation (most quantity), environmental interventions
LCA step 2
consistency check, completeness check, contribution analysis
LCA step 4
impact assessment
LCA step 3
The idea of “foods from nowhere”
Rural lands and peoples will continue to be appropriated and disposessed
Animal abuse and exploitative labour relations
Externalizes real costs to the future or to ‘invisible’ externalities.
what are these consequences of?
the capitalistic food system
What are post-growth attributes?
sufficiency over efficiency
regeneration over extraction
distribution over accumulation
commons over private ownership
care over control
Why are small-scale farmers and urban/rural gardening important?
Community, culture, education, shortening food-circuits, water/land efficiency,
SSP1
sustainable;( sustainable growth and equality)
ssp2
middle of the road; (socioeconomic and tech patterns do not shift markedly from historical patterns)
ssp3
regional rivalry; (fragmented world of resurgent nationalism; competitiveness, insecurity, domestic issues.)
ssp4
Inequality; (Ever increasing inequality.)
ssp5
regional rivalry/rocky road; (rapid and extreme growth, faith in tech process and economic development and fossil fuels.)
Is energy use increase affecting social wellbeing?
Yes, but only before a certain threshold in which all human needs are met
What are need satisfiers?
Culturally defined needs
What are human needs?
Universally necessary needs for the human body
What is the bottom-up approach in necessity calculation?
That we look at what we would need for a good, decent life (in energy use, consumption etc. )and we calculate from there what we need for it (rather than start calculating from production, and assuming that more is always better)
What is the bottom-up approach in necessity calculation?
That we look at what we would need for a good, decent life (in energy use, consumption etc.)and we calculate from there what we need for it (rather than start calculating from production, and assuming that more is always better)
Attempt to capture all
costs/benefits into economic
terms; passive and direct
Total Economic Valuation (TEV)
Economic or non-economic method to compare policy impact(s), puts weights/values to different policy ideas with different values
Multi-criteria/weighted analysis
Compares traditional econmic costs and benefits, excludes externalities
Cost benefit analysis (CBA)
the extent to which
we can exclude groups from
consuming a good
excludability
How one person’s
marginal consumption of a good
affects someone else’s ability to
consume that same good
rivalry
tragedy of the commons formula
high rivalry + low excludability = tragedy of the commons
Consequences of the state ‘protecting nature/resources’
public goods become rivalrous AND excludable
benefit from unit change in product
marginal benefit
MPB=MSC=MPC (externality calculations)
Market equilibrium/market optimum
The calculated difference between the private and the social is the…
social welfare loss (when private costs are lower than social costs)
What does the traditional demand/supply graph not account for?
Spillover costs/benefits
● Social welfare loss
● Socially optimal market equilibrium
Producer willingness to sell (S)
● Consumer willingness to pay (D)
● Equilibrium between private parties
traditional demand-supply curve
How does globalisation affect consumer patterns?
Globalisation detaches the consumer from the scale, space, and time impact and accountability
How does inequality tie into overconsumption?
Inequality may influence status anxiety + materialism
What bars individual change in behaviour for the climate?
money, time, availability (3), education, accessibility,
What is an issue with behavioural efficiency improvements?
They are balanced again by us spending our money on other things by saving on environment
For how much will consumer change account for systemic change?
25-50%
How to increase pro-environmental behaviour
choice architecture (incentives, conditions)
Education
Social norms and shift to long-termism.
Accept what aligns with our values
cognitive bia
My actions are nill
defeatism
What are issues with climate education?
knowledge gaps, misinformation, hard to reach groups, high impact groups not targeted
s the environmental kuznet curve work in countries?
Only in a small number of countries is it true
- Reducing yield gaps
- Precision agriculture
- Perennials
- GMOs (tolerance to CC)
- Synthetic proteins
- Agroecology
- Vertical farming
- Limited herbicides or pesticides or:
- Mechanical weeding & pesticides
- More able to multicrop
- More monitoring and real-time ag
What are these examples of?
Production innovation in the food system
What does it mean that only a few corporations own a whole production/food chain?
It means there is a huge concentration of power industrially.
How is poverty connected to sustainability issues?
child labour, malnutrition, deforestation, gender inequality, forced labour, nos ustainable agricultural practices
What are the characteristics of a linear ecoonomy?
Take -> Make -> dispose
What are three theoretical lenses for doing lifestyle assessments?
improve (efficiency) -> shift (transition) -> avoid (sufficiency)
Insulate housing, switch to smaller car, choose rregenerative farming is an example of…
Improve (efficiency)
Renewable electricity, switching to an electric car, eating vegan is an example of…
shift (modal shift)
Reducing living space, oving closer to work, reducing food waste is an example of…
avoid
What is the use of social tipping points?
Social tipping elements can boost
decarbonization efforts by
boosting one another (social
dynamics)
the composition of the food basket changes with income (less starch, more rich).
Bennet’s law
as income increases, the proportion spent on food declines
Engel’ s law
Long-term vs. short-term
* Quantitative vs. Qualitative
* Regional vs. Global
* Forecasting vs. Backcasting
* Scenario vs. Storyline
* Baseline vs. Transition
These are…
questions for different scenarios
the analysis of reception of the raw materials to the completion of the production process
gate to gate (production process)
cradle to cradle
design philosophy in which there is a closed cycle
crop cultivation -> feed mill
cradle (birth of product) to gate (completion of production process)
crop cultivation -> consumption
cradle to grave
artificial grass more sustainable over long-term than regular grass is an example of…
That LCA is complicated
partitioning the input and/or output flows of a process to the product system under study.
allocation
allocating input and output flows of a process according to mass/quantity
mass allocation
Allocating input and output flows of a process according to money flows
Economic allocation
an analytical method to quantify flows and stocks of materials or substances in a well-defined system; an important tool to study the bio-physical aspects of human activity on different spatial and temporal scales.
Material Flow Analysis (MFA)
a quantitative economic model that represents the interdependencies between different sectors of a national economy or different regional economies; shows different influxes and shows different factors that are all interrelated so that we can do calculations with them
Input -Ouput Analysis (I&O/IOA)
a quantitative economic modelen that represents the interdependencies between different sectors of a national economy or different regional economies; shows different influxes and shows different factors that are all interrelated so that we can do calculations with them
Input -Ouput Analysis (I&O/IOA)
Environmental extensions
extensions from IOA that are related to environment; resource extraction, land use, water, emissions
extension coefficients and coefficients
What will usually be added to the IOA to make EEIO (environmentally extended Input Output Analysis)
Main difference between EEIO and MFA
monetary vs physical transactions
across all sectors vs one specific bulk of materials or substance across sectors
trade vs physical flows
MFA level
meso
EEIO level
macro
