Assessment on impacts of emission trading on city-level (ET-CL)

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NOTE! The name should be changed again: this is not about trade of coal, but trade of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

New name: Assessment on impacts of emission trading on city-level

Impacts of emission trading on city-level is an Impact assessment that takes a wide perspective over environmental issues that can be dealt with on a city level. The focus is on issues that are affected by the requirements set by an international treaty on greenhouse gas emission reduction and its regional operationalization in the EU. It studies many of the contemporary ideas, plans, and pieces of legislation in an integrated and systematic way. It tries to find hidden caveats, expose policies that are based on popular trends rather than science, and assess the impacts of new innovative solutions. It aims to offer information and guidance to the political process for developing a new international treaty in the UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen (COP-15), December 2009. The Analytica model file can be accessed here.

This assessment is tightly coupled with two other assessments:


Scope

Purpose

The purpose is to evaluate the impacts of alternative greenhouse gas emission trade systems, which aim to reduce GHG emissions and thereby affect. The assessment is performed on city-level, and the greenhouse gas emission trade systems are taken as constraints to the city-level decision making set externally. The focus is thus on city-level climate change mitigation measures in the major sectors, namely electricity production, heating, and traffic. Three major outputs are considered: a) greenhouse gas emissions; b) health impacts within the city; and c) costs of greenhouse gas trade and direct costs of mitigation itself. The health impacts of climate change are not within the focus, but rather the impacts of climate change mitigation measures that are put in action in the city within decision making context constrained by the emission trading system. Individual and societal interests and decisions, and their interplay is specifically on focus. Situations where individual and societal values are in conflict are identified and examined. Policies aiming at resolution of these conflicts are sought for.

Especially, the assessment aims to produce useful guidance and insight into the UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen (COP-15) in December 2009.

The basic research question for the assessment can be defined as:What are the impacts of emission trading on city-level?.

The question can be broken down into a set of sub-question e.g. as

  • How does the composition of an emission trading system influence city-level decisions upon activities relevant to emission trading?
  • How do those city-level decisions affect the decision making of individual citizens?
  • how do these decisions together result as changes in the emission trading relevant activities, and consequently their impacts.

The information under the various attributes below contains explanations of how answers to these questions are sought as well as the tentative answers to these questions.

Boundaries

  • Spatial: Helsinki Metropolitan Area (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Kauniainen)
  • Temporal: From beginning of EU ETS phase III (2013) to year 2030. Especially, years 2013, 2020, and 2030 considered.
  • Activity sectors:
    • Personal traffic
    • Heating of buildings and water
    • Power consumption
  • Pollutants:
    • CO2 from transport and heat and power production
    • Fine particles (PM2.5) from transport and heat and power production
  • Health impacts: Cardiopulmonary mortality due to exposure to fine particles (PM2.5). DALYs are used for summarizing health effects.
  • Other impacts: Costs
    • (change in) direct internal costs of the activities
    • Costs of emission permits (emission trading)
    • Personal direct costs for citizens consuming services provided by the activities
  • Population: The whole population in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area (capital region) is considered as the active population making societal and individual decisions regarding the activities and whose health impacts attributable to the activities are estimated. However, climate change impact of the emitted CO2 is considered globally.
  • Decision-makers:
    • The international community deciding upon international climate agreement and political leaders of EU deciding upon the EU-ETS
    • The society in Helsinki region, in particular the Helsinki Metropolitan Area Council as the decision-maker for inter-municipality decisions such as public transport, and the city councils of Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen
    • Random citizens living in the area (as residents or passengers)
  • Decisions:
    • International decisions about the EU-ETS (as a constraint to city-level decision making)
    • City-level decisions regarding heating, transportation and electricity consumption influenced by the EU-ETS
    • Citizen-level decisions regarding the choice of mode of transportation, the choice of mode of heating in detached houses, and improving energy efficiency (as adaptation to the city-level decisions)


Optional extensions of the core assessment:

Possible extensions may take place in addition to the core project, if the right experts, resources, and interest show up during the assessment.

  • Copenhagen could be another case city.
  • The assessment of Helsinki could be extended to the whole metropolitan area (Greater Helsinki), including the neighbouring municipalities within ca. 60 km from Helsinki. (The current coverage is ca. 25 km.)
  • Physical exercise due to daily activities and the related health impacts could be assessed.
  • Household waste treatment (typically landfill vs. incineration) could be assessed as a source of energy, fine particles, and greenhouse gases.

Scenarios

D↷

  1. Base-case: EU-ETS on phase III as suggested by EU commission, including following amendments to current ETS ([1], [2], en:European Union Emission Trading Scheme):
    • possibility to exclude small installations from ETS if < 25 MW rated power and < 10 kt CO2 emission/year
    • CO2 emissions from petrochemicals, ammonia & aluminium production included
    • N2O emissions from nitric, adipic & glyoxalic acid included
    • perfluorocarbon (PFC) emissions from aluminium production included
    • carbon capture and storage (CCS) possibly included
    • air transport included
    • centralized allocation of emission permits (total emission cap defined for whole EU instead of national action plans by member states)
    • auctioning of > 60 % of permits (instead of distributing all for free)
    • EU-wide emission cap set as: phase II cap (1859.27 Mt CO2), adjusted to the broadened scope of phase, and decreasing annually by 1,74 % (1720 Mt CO2e by 2020)
    • NOTE: road & ship transport NOT included
    • NOTE: land use, land use change & forestry NOT included
  2. Exclusion of small installations discarded from ETS
  3. Road transport IS included in the ETS (emission permits to fuel suppliers)
  4. EU-wide emission cap set as ??? (significantly tighter than base-case)
  5. Future development paths according to IPCC scenarios?

Intended users

Participants

Preliminary draft, no commitments whatsoever made.

  • The Risk research group from KTL.
    • Jouni (composite traffic)
    • Marko (role?)
    • Mikko (role?)
    • Virpi (Claih)
    • Pauliina (Bioher)
    • Erkki (traffic: congestion charging, noise)
  • PM epi group in KTL? (connection to Claih?)
  • PM tox group in KTL?
  • Exposure group in KTL?
  • PM emission group in UKU?
  • Aerosol dynamics group in FMI?
  • Cost-benefit assessors with cost functions in USTUTT?
  • Intarese WP1.4
  • Intarese SP3 2nd pass?
  • Jim Morris (composite traffic)
  • Niko Karvosenoja, SYKE (FRES)?
  • IIASA
  • FMI?
  • The Open Assessors' Network
  • Anyone interested. This is an open assessment

Definition

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Decision variables

D↷

International decisions:

  • Include road traffic in EU-ETS (yes/no)
  • Small installations excluded from EU-ETS (yes/no)
  • EU-ETS emission cap set tighter than commission proposal (yes (how much?)/no)

Primary city-level decisions (optimizing total cost, including health costs):

  • More support for public transport (Yes/No) - support targeted directly to ticket price
  • Extension of the district heating system (Yes/No) - additional network, additional heat production
  • Founding a composite traffic system (Yes/No) - targeted to areas lacking good public transport, changed distribution of car/composite/public traffic

Optional additional city-level decisions:

  • Subsidies for improving energy efficiency in buildings (Yes/No) - also to be considered in Claih?
  • Area planning and land use (Dense vs. loose city structure for new buildings)
  • Replacing current CHP plants for district heating heat source with potential Fortum nuclear power plant in Loviisa (yes/no).
  • Choice of fuel for district heating - also to be considered in Claih?
  • Setting a congestion charge zone to downtown Helsinki (yes/no)

Citizen-level decisions (optimizing direct personal cost):

  • Mode of transportation (personal car/composite traffic/public transportation
  • Choice of heating system in new detached houses (Electricity/Oil/Wood chip) (see Bioher)
  • Energy efficiency upgrade (yes/no) - interaction with city-level energy efficiency subsidies

Indicator variables

  • Total societal costs
  • Health impacts (cardiopulmonary mortality)
  • Total GHG emissions

Other variables

Main model

  • PM2.5 emissions
  • PM2.5 exposure
  • Exposure-response function for PM2.5
  • DALY weights
  • Population
  • Background incidence of cardiopulmonary mortality
  • Cost of emission permit
  • Direct personal costs for citizens
  • Future development paths (IPCC scenarios)
  • Costs of mitigation measures (for non-technical measures there will be a discussion possibility on the National Integrated Assessment Webpage : go to hot topics)

CHP module

  • CHP production
  • Consumption of district heating energy
  • PM2.5 emissions from CHP
  • GHG emissions from CHP
  • Power consumption
  • Power import
  • PM2.5 emissions from power import
  • GHG emissions from import
  • Emission factors in CHP
  • Cost of expanding district heating network
  • Cost of emission permit

Housing stock module

  • Building stock
  • Cost of upgrading energy efficiency

Traffic module

  • Traffic volume
  • PM2.5 emissions from traffic
  • GHG emissions from traffic
  • Personal direct traffic costs
  • Cost of support for public transportation
  • Cost of emission permit
  • Set-up cost of a composite traffic system

Indices

  • Time: Years 2013, 2020, 2030
  • Age groups: years 0-1, 1-30, 31-65, 65+
  • Area: 129 areas within the Helsinki Municipality Area

Analyses

  • Value of information (VOI) analysis on all decision options
    • VOI on PM2.5 emissions with an updated PM2.5 dose-response function
  • Optimizing of actions based on cost-benefit analysis and a utilitarian decision-maker
  • BBN
  • Analysis of conflicting interests of the citizen, the municipality, and the industry
  • It might be a clarifying way to describe all energy flows using the basic unit (in addition to watt) which is equal to the primary energy consumption of an average person. This is something like 100 W (or for a working person, a few hundred watts). Another way to express radiative forcing is to compare it to the primary energy utilised for a particular greenhouse gas emission. Generally, the ratio is in the order of 1 J utilised, 300 J of increased radiative forcing.

Result

Results

Not yet available.

Conclusions

Not yet available.

See also

References

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