Energy use for Adaptation (EnergyA)

Description:

Energy is not only the usual suspect usually singled out as the main culprit behind climate change. It is also key to climate change adaptation, which implies that temperature and humidity changes can further contribute to increase in energy needs, mainly through a substantial expansion of cooling demand.

More energy could mean more emissions and higher energy prices, with potentially negative consequences for poor households and economic competitiveness. However, today we still do not know whether these implications could hinder progress towards sustainability and decarbonization.

EnergyA aims to improve our understanding of how energy and energy services can be used by households and industries to adapt to the risk posed by climate change. Specifically, the project will develop an interdisciplinary and scalable research framework integrating data and methods from economics with geography, climate science, and integrated assessment modeling to provide new knowledge concerning heterogeneity in energy use across countries, sectors, socioeconomic conditions, and income groups, and assess the broad implications adaptation-driven energy use can have on the economy, the environment, and welfare. The key novelty of EnergyA is to link energy statistics and energy survey data with high spatial resolution data from climate science and remote sensing, including high-resolution spatial data on meteorology, population and economic activity distribution, electrification, and the built environment.

The underlying idea behind this project is that adaptation is one of the major global challenges of our century, and energy is a critical enabling factor. But how much energy will we need? Where could adaptation hotspots arise? Will increasing energy needs exacerbate poverty? The ENERGYA project will deal with these issues through a 3-step investigation program.

• Analyze historical data on energy use in relation to climate and weather. The project will combine subnational statistics and surveys on energy use with high-resolution geographic data including climatic variables to expand knowledge to four key emerging economies, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and to go beyond the residential sector.
• Develop future scenarios of climate-induced energy demand at a global scale, building on the evidence from the past.  The project will provide this missing element by combining the empirical evidence based on historical data with the new scenarios for climate, GDP, population, and urbanization scenarios the research modeling community is finalizing.
• Assess the environmental and socio-economic implications under a range of uncertain alternative futures. To understand the socio-economic and environmental implications of future energy needs, this project will elucidate the distributional implications of adaptation to highlight potentially regressive consequences.

Project information

Lead

CMCC Foundation

Partners

CMCC Foundation, Italy

Ca' Foscari University, Venice, Italy

Source of funding

European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 756194.