Quantitative Sustainability Assessment – Climate Change

The project will develop a concept and tool for quantitative sustainability assessment of technologies with specific focus on the climatic sustainability and positioning this relative to the other environmental categories of impact. The work will involve 4 main work topics:

• Understanding climate related impacts and damage and development of impact pathway - Climate change leads to impacts and damage in ecosystems that need to be considered in order to evaluate and compare the sustainability of various technologies. Therefore an important task is to  connect emissions of greenhouse gases and changes in land use with resulting changes in the climate and the impacts on ecosystems through the development of an impact pathway in qualitative terms focusing on the known or conjectured mechanisms and causal relationships throughout the causal chain from the technology’s exchange with the environment (emission or change in land use) over changes in the atmospheric composition and regional changes in climate and meteorological patterns to the resulting changes in the function and structure of ecosystems.
   
• Quantification of climate impacts, climate factor interactions and consequences for assessment strategies - The influence of the individual factors and their interactions in the impact pathway defined in task 1 will be evaluated with respect to the ecosystem damage. The impacts of some individual factors may be assessed from ongoing and past experiments and literature values, while impacts involving elevated CO2 and in particular impacts involving interactions between several simultaneous factors may be difficult to obtain, since CO2 and multifactor impacts constitute a unique change different from previous impacts, and the impacts can only be derived from experiments, such as the CLIMAITE experiment.
   
• Scaling impacts from local to global scales - Measurements of impacts are typically done at the plot scale by monitoring certain processes and states in response to the changes in drivers. However, the sustainability assessment typically takes a more general view, and there is a need to generalize the results from these plot scale experiments. This can be done by dynamic ecosystem models, which in addition to generalizing the responses also can be used to test different climate scenarios and thereby obtain a broader view on the potential impacts and the time scale at which they appear.
   
• Evaluation of the uncertainty of the various steps in the impacts pathway - Each step in the sustainability assessment along the impact pathway from the emission to the ecosystem damage is associated with some uncertainty related to either the quantification of the step or the damage or impact evaluation.

 
The goal for the sustainability assessment is to reduce the overall uncertainty compared to the potential error of not including the processes in the impact assessment (as is currently the case), and it will be evaluated how the uncertainty builds up as the modeling includes more and more of the impact pathway in order to assess the extent that is reasonable to include given this accompanying uncertainty.

Participants:
The project is a collaboration between Risø DTU and DTU Management.

Role:
ECO is responsibility for the quantification and scaling of impacts.

Resources:
The project is funded by the VKR Postdoc programme.

Duration:
The project is funded to run from 2010 through 2011.