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

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 t

SUBMITTER: Scovronick N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5699025 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature