Despite climate change being an increasingly important focus of scientific and policy discourse and against a backdrop of rising greenhouse gas emissions, the Russian government has, thus far, failed to commit to an ambitious emission reduction target based on the latest science. For Russia to develop informed, internally consistent and scientifically literate policies, it is important to assess the scale of the challenge and explore implications of different levels of mitigation. To this end, the thesis derives Russia's cumulative emission budgets and generates associated low-carbon pathways in the context of both a re-developing economy and international climate change objectives (in particular, keeping the global mean temperature increase below 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels). This thesis draws on several disciplines, bringing together bottom-up energy system modelling from engineering and physical sciences, as well as stakeholder and expert interviews from social sciences. The principal methodological approach used here is backcasting, with a number of stakeholder interviews providing a 'reality check' for the scenarios. Given the global delay in acting on climate change, the contextual 2°C scenarios generated are ambitious and extremely challenging. With significant changes on both demand and supply sides, an annual post-peak emission reduction rate of at least 10% is required to meet the cumulative budget constraint; this despite the dramatic fall in Russia's emissions in the 1990s. Such radical reduction rates are well in excess of anything achieved or, indeed, deemed possible within existing mitigation policies and integrated assessment models - either in Russia or in any other part of the world. The necessary emission reductions would involve significant material changes to the energy system. Even with early reductions, to attain a low-carbon energy system in 2050 in accordance with the 2°C cumulative emission constraint, all of the available 'mature' technological options would need to be employed. In particular, short-term mitigation can be facilitated by Russia's large energy efficiency potential and a significant biomass potential. In the long term, mitigation could draw on the country's considerable renewable energy resources. If the peak in Russia's emissions is delayed until 2020-2025, staying within a national 2°C budget constraint will require a rapid and widespread deployment of currently speculative negative-emission technologies. Whilst the suggested mitigation pathways with emissions peaking early are demanding, they are potentially less challenging and destabilising than failing to mitigate and subsequently adapting to climate change impacts of a 6-16°C temperature rise across Russia. The precautionary principle, together with the multiple uncertainties associated with negative emissions, would suggest that starting the decarbonisation process early is critical. Along with other big emitters, Russia has a pivotal role in influencing the future direction of international climate change mitigation and adaptation. Not only is Russia a major emitter of greenhouse gases and a global supplier of fossil fuels, but also it remains a major force in geopolitics, and its diverse territory is both vulnerable and resilient to the impacts of climate change. This unique confluence of circumstances leaves Russia with a challenging dilemma. The country can choose to acquiesce to short-term political and economic considerations, adopt weak mitigation measures and face potentially devastating impacts. Or it can apply its considerable attributes and powers to instigate an epoch of national and global action to secure a low-carbon and climate-resilient future. Whilst the former will see Russia subsumed into the international malaise on climate change, the latter may both quench the nation's "thirst for greatness" and fill the void of climate leadership.

Northern forest ecosystems play an important role in global carbon (C) cycling and are considered to be a net C sink for atmospheric C (IPCC, 2007; Pan, et al., 2011). Reservoir creation is a common cause of deforestation and when coupled with persistent harvest activity that occurs in forest ecosystems, these disturbance events can significantly affect the C budget of a watershed. To understand the effects of these factors on carbon cycling at a landscape level, an examination of forest harvest and reservoir creation was carried out in the watershed of the Sooke Lake Reservoir, the primary water supply for the Greater Victoria area in British Columbia. Covering the period between 1910 and 2012, a detailed disturbance and forest cover dataset was generated for the Sooke Lake Watershed (SLW) and used as input into a spatially-explicit version of the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector 3 (CBM-CFS3). The model was modified to include export of C out of the forest system in the form of dissolved organic C (DOC) into streams. The fraction of decaying C exported through this mechanism was tuned in the model using DOC measurements from three catchments within the SLW. Site-specific growth and yield curves were also generated for watershed forest stand types, in part, by using LiDAR-derived site indices. C transfers associated with disturbances were adjusted to reflect the disturbance types that occurred during the 100-year study period. Due to the removal of C resulting from wildfire, logging and residue burning, as well as deforestation disturbances, total ecosystem C stocks dropped from 700 metric tonnes of C per hectare (tC ha-1) in 1910 to their current (2012) level of ~550 tC ha-1 across the SLW. Assuming no change in management priorities and negligible effects of climate change, total ecosystem C stocks will not recover to 1910 levels until 2075. The cumulative effect of reservoir creation and expansion on the C budget resulted in 14 tC ha-1 less being sequestered (111,217 tC total) across the watershed by 2012. In contrast, sustained yield forestry within the Capital Regional District’s tenure accounts for a 93 tC ha-1 decrease by 2012, representing an impact six times greater than deforestation associated with reservoir creation. The proportionally greater impact of forestry activity is partly due to current C accounting rules (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that treats C removed from the forest in the form of Harvested Wood Products as C immediately released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Cumulative DOC export to the Sooke Lake reservoir was ~30,660 tC by 2012, representing a substantial pathway for C leaving the forest ecosystem. However, more research is required to understand what fraction of terrestrially-derived DOC is sequestered long term in lake sediment. The results of this study will assist forest manager decision making on the appropriate management response to future forest disturbance patterns that could result from climate change and to improve climate change mitigation efforts. / Graduate / 0478 / 0425 / 0368 / byrons@uvic.ca

A growing awareness of the severity of the climate crisis caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions has led to an increased effort to find governance strategies to transition society towards sustainable development. One recently adopted strategy is the adoption of local carbon budgets, derived from the so-called global carbon budget, within local governments across Sweden. In this thesis, I explore this happening through a case study of the county of Västra Götaland, Sweden using the concept of governmentality to provide critical analysis of the use of local carbon budgets in an attempt to encourage reflexive governance. By conducting semi-structured interviews with persons involved in the adoption of local carbon budgets in Västra Götaland, I seek to gain a greater understanding of how local carbon budgets impact the way actors seek to govern climate through the adoption of new programs of conduct that seek the reform of the current regime of practices that exist within the county. I explore how such carbon budgets construct the problem of climate change and the need for rapid decarbonization to discover what practices are limited or made possible through such a construction. I find that local carbon budgets are problematizing several areas of municipal and regional governance, conceptually and practically, particularly in the way actors understand climate change and the decarbonization challenge. I argue that a reterritorialization of the climate into local ‘emission spaces’ allows for the quantification and distribution of limited ‘emissions resources’ amongst actors in the county. This territorialization and quantification of a constructed resource contribute to a perception of urgency critical to motivating action to decarbonize. These conditions create a mandate for political action to resolve the constructed problem of scarce ‘emissions resources’ within a municipality or county’s ‘emissions space’ to ensure a ‘fair’ distribution in society. I further suggest that actors adopting local carbon budgets should consider the application of common-pool resource management strategies to move governance beyond an internal carbon budgeting approach.

The increase of global average temperature depends linearly on the amount of carbon dioxide that is accumulating in the atmosphere. Consequently, the determination of a temperature target that should not be exceeded, corresponds to an amount of carbon dioxide that can still be emitted. This is referred to as a carbon budget. With the Paris Agreement, a global commitment to such a target exists. The signatories have pledged to hold “the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C […] and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”. Although the wording leaves room for interpretation, the Paris Agreement can hence be translated into a remaining global carbon budget. The distribution of this budget amongst countries can be a way to close the gap between the committed target and Nationally Determined Contributions, which are submitted by each country but currently expected to lead to a warming of more than 2°C. Taking the concept of national carbon budgets further and sharing them out on a smaller scale can support municipalities in framing their mitigation targets and planning measures accordingly. In this regard, the aim of this thesis was to calculate a Paris-compliant carbon budget for the city of Rostock, Germany. This was done by sharing out the remaining global carbon budget amongst countries based on the notion of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’, which is part of the Paris Agreement. To reflect on this notion two different country classifications were applied which resulted in carbon budgets for Germany of 4 450 and 6 200 MtCO2 respectively up from 1st January 2021. For a share between German municipalities, the grandfathering principle was applied. It allocates a budget to a municipality depending on the proportion in national emissions. An inventory, which was prepared for this purpose, revealed that Rostock’s territorial emissions accounted for 0.12% of all-German emissions in 2017. Based on this share, Rostock would receive a budget of 5 500 to 7 600 ktCO2 up from 2021, depending on the country classification. The thesis found further that current mitigation targets were falling short of complying with the Paris Agreement. Currently, both Germany and Rostock are basing their efforts on budgets two to three times larger than what can be considered a fair contribution.

Success or failure of climate policies in limiting warming to beneath particular thresholds depends on several physical, economic and social uncertainties. Whilst scenario analysis can be informative as to the types of policies that are required to achieve these goals, the complexity of scenario analysis often masks the underlying fundamental choices. This dissertation introduces the concept of the ‘decarbonization identity' to simply and systematically describe the mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive range of choices available in future climate policy decisions. The simple identity states that the remaining carbon budget [B] for a given level of warming can be partitioned into four areas: the already committed 'baked-in' emissions from existing capital stock [E]; new commitments arising from investments in additional capital stock yet to be made [N]; less the stranding of existing or future capital stock [S]; and the additional atmospheric space created by negative emissions technologies (NETs) [A]. This dissertation finds that currently operating electricity generators [E] would already emit more CO2 (~300 GtCO₂) then is compatible with currently available generation-only carbon budgets [B] for a temperature rise of 1.5-2°C (~240 GtCO₂). In addition, the current pipeline of planned fossil fuel power plants would add almost the same amount [N] of emission commitments (~270 GtCO₂) to this capital stock again. Finally, these carbon budgets are inherently uncertain and depend on future, yet to be achieved, reductions of short-lived climate pollutant (SLCP) emissions. Should those reductions not be achieved today's remaining carbon budgets could be up to 37% smaller. Policymakers have now five choices to achieve the Paris climate goals: (1) protect and enhance carbon budgets by early and decisive action on SLCPs; (2) retrofit existing power generators with carbon capture and storage (3) ensure that no new polluting capital stock is added; (4) strand a considerable amount of global electricity generation capacity; and (5) create additional atmospheric space by scaling up NETs. Over the coming years and decades, the challenge will be to identify the most efficient balance of these options.

Human induced climate change poses a series of ethical challenges to the current political economy, although it has often be regarded by economists as only an ethical issue for those concerned about future generations. The central debate in economics has then concerned the rate at which future costs and benefits should be discounted. Indeed the full range of ethical aspects of climate change are rarely even discussed. Despite recent high profile and lengthy academic papers on the topic the ethical remains at best superficial within climate change economics. Recognising the necessary role of ethical judgment poses a problem for economists who conduct exercises in cost-benefit analysis and deductive climate modelling under the presumption of an objectivity that excludes values. Priority is frequently given to orthodox economic methodology, but that this entails a consequentialist utilitarian philosophy is forgotten while the terms of the debate and understanding is simultaneously restricted. We set out to raise the relevance of a broader range of ethical issues including: intergenerational ethics as the basis for the discount rate, interregional distribution of harm, equity and justice issues concerning the allocation of carbon budgets, incommensurability in the context of compensation, and the relationship of climate ethics to economic growth. We argue that the pervasiveness of strong uncertainty in climate science, incommensurability of values and nonutilitarian ethics are inherent features of the climate policy debate. That mainstream economics is ill-equipped to address these issues relegates it to the category of misplaced concreteness and its policy prescriptions are then highly misleading misrepresentations of what constitutes ethical action. (authors' abstract) / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers