Suchergebnisse

The aim of this thesis is to address certain aspects of climate change which have not attracted sufficient attention. The first part is an empirical one investigating impacts of climate change on households and individuals using the hedonic price approach (for Great Britain and Germany). In addition, we examine the relationship between climate and happiness (for 67 countries). The second part of the thesis is an analytical one in the field of emissions permit trading. As progress in the international negotiations is extremely slow and failure is not excluded we first consider the coordination of domestic markets for tradable emission permits where countries determine their own emission reduction targets. Another aspect which has not attracted sufficient attention is the time-dimension of a trading scheme. We analyse the dynamic aspects of allocating emission rights for different approaches in the final chapter

Marine and coastal ecosystems - and thus the benefits they create for humans - are subject to increasing pressures and competing usages. For this reason, the European Union (EU) adopted the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), which is to guide future maritime policy in the EU and aims at achieving or maintaining a good environmental status (GES) of the European seas by 2020. To this end, the MSFD requires the development of improvement measures, which have to be assessed inter alia by examining their cost-effectiveness and by carrying out cost-benefit analysis (CBA) before their implementation. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of environmental CBA in the marine context and identify and discuss problems that may hamper the environmental effectiveness of the MSFD. For example, marine ecosystem services are much less tangible than terrestrial ecosystem services. This implies greater challenges for the quantification of societal benefits in a marine context. One finding is that the limitations of environmental valuation methods regarding their ability to capture the whole total economic value of improvement measures are a potential source of problems, as the MSFD allows countries to disregard measures with disproportionately high costs. The trans-boundary nature of the main European seas adds to the complexity of the valuation task, e.g. due to the danger that benefits that occur outside of national territories are neglected. Moreover, the current state of knowledge on the functioning of complex marine ecosystems and the links to socio-economic impacts and human well-being seems insufficient to meet the MSFD requirements.

Within the German welfare system, heating expenditures of recipients are in general fully covered by the government. This paper empirically tests for the hypothesis that households receiving welfare payments turn to over consumption of residential space heating. We use microdata from two different data sources to explore whether conditional heating expenditures of these households significantly differ from those of other households. Our empirical findings suggest that even when controlling for a range of other factors this is indeed the case as heating expenditures lie about 10 percent above those of other households. These results are fairly robust to sensitivity analyses. Our results imply that there is potential scope for cost savings if this policy is changed

Within the German welfare system, heating expenditures of recipients are in general fully covered by the government. This paper empirically tests for the hypothesis that households receiving welfare payments turn to over consumption of residential space heating. We use microdata from two different data sources to explore whether conditional heating expenditures of these households significantly differ from those of other households. Our empirical findings suggest that even when controlling for a range of other factors this is indeed the case as heating expenditures lie about 10 percent above those of other households. These results are fairly robust to sensitivity analyses. Our results imply that there is potential scope for cost savings if this policy is changed.

Klimaschutz und Klimaanpassung ; Adaptation to climate change is becoming increasingly crucial for coastal areas. This paper adds to the limited evidence on the trade-offs people are willing to make to support decision-making on adaptation strategies for coastal protection. The trade-off between alternative protection modes is conceptualized in a choice experiment in terms of six attributes: the extent of beach nourishment, dyke heightening, cliff protection, access to dunes, realignment of dykes and dunes, and cost in terms of a coastal protection levy. These attributes were selected and designed in, among others, close cooperation with governmental decision makers. When accounting for preference heterogeneity, three latent classes were identified among the more than 1800 participants of a nationwide online survey in Germany. Respondents who prefer extensive changes, respondents who are willing to pay for an increase in dyke height but are not ready to give up money for a change in any other attribute, and respondents who are not willing to cover any additional expenses for coastal adaptation to climate change. The results allow to assess a broad range of future adaptation strategies and thus provide not only to policy makers and the administration in the case study region important insights into peoples' preferences.

Public opinion has a substantial impact on political actions. However, public opinion might be driven by temporary emotions. If these emotions cool off over time, public opinion might change as well. This paper analyses how emotions drive public opinion over time for the case of an environmental climate engineering technology, namely solar radiation management (SRM). SRM is a possible strategy to fight climate change by injection of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere. Its potential implementation involves major risks and faces strong public opposition. Using panel survey data, we show that most respondents initially show strong negative emotions towards SRM and reject the technology. However, emotions cool off over time and acceptance increases. The increase in acceptance is larger, the longer the cooling-off period between two surveys is.

Our analysis is the first of its kind to explore patterns of subsidization and CO2 emissions in China's electricity producing sector. Applying data for all power plants across China and controlling for the age, capacity and location of generating stations, we find that plants attracting a higher government subsidy are also worryingly the plants generating a disproportionate share of CO2 emissions. This distortion is incongruent with China's aspiration for a greener economy but may be eliminated if China delivers on its November 2013 announcement to review many industry subsidies on its way to a fully-fledged market economy (Bloomberg News, 28.02.2014).