IREES colloquium: Allocating planetary boundaries to economies: implications of different approaches and comparisons with current environmental footprints | Guest lecture Harry Wilting, Department of Integrated Environmental Policy Analysis. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency
| When: | Th 22-10-2020 15:00 - 16:00 |
| Where: | via ZOOM |
Speaker | Dr. H.C. (Harry) Wilting, Department of Integrated Environmental Policy Analysis. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.
Title | Allocating planetary boundaries to economies: implications of different approaches and comparisons with current environmental footprints.
Summary | The planetary boundaries (PB) framework proposes global quantitative precautionary limits for human perturbation of nine critical Earth system processes, together defining a global safe operating space for human development. As decisions regarding environmental management and resource use are not made at the global scale, translating the global PBs to lower geographical scales is needed to increase their policy relevance. For climate change, many proposals for fair and equitable sharing of global emission reduction obligations (allocation approaches) have been presented and discussed in the literature. For other PBs, however, the discussion on allocation of global pressures or budgets is less developed. In the presentation, national resource budgets for the PBs on climate change, land-system change, changes in biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus) and biosphere integrity will be discussed, for four large economies (EU, USA, China and India) and the Netherlands, using different allocation approaches. Furthermore, the allocated PBs are compared to current national environmental pressures and impacts from a consumption (footprint) perspective, using a multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model. The proposed methodology and results can help defining national policy targets in line with the global SDG ambition.
Biography | Harry C. Wilting is an environmental economist working on models on sustainable production and consumption at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. His specialisation is in the field of environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output, footprint and supply-chain analysis. He is author/co-author of several publications on methodological issues and empirical analyses in these fields most recently on biodiversity footprints. Harry holds an MSc in mathematics and computer science, and a PhD in environmental sciences, both from the University of Groningen. The topic of his PhD thesis was a comparison of methodologies to calculate energy footprints including an empirical assessment of energy use in the Netherlands from a production and consumption perspective.
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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85642457288?pwd=anl1c0JEMytZZTFOeGl5L0tyY1Jxdz09
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