Integrating Global Climate Change Mitigation Goals with Other Sustainability Objectives: A Synthesis

Achieving a truly sustainable energy transition requires progress across multiple dimensions beyond climate change mitigation goals. This article reviews and synthesizes results from disparate strands of literature on the coeffects of mitigation to inform climate policy choices at different governance levels. The literature documents many potential cobenefits of mitigation for nonclimate objectives, such as human health and energy security, but little is known about their overall welfare implications.

Integrated model studies highlight that climate policies as part of well-designed policy packages reduce the overall cost of achieving multiple sustainability objectives. The incommensurability and uncertainties around the quantification of coeffects become, however, increasingly pervasive the more the perspective shifts from sectoral and local to economy wide and global, the more objectives are analyzed, and the more the results are expressed in economic rather than nonmonetary terms.

Different strings of evidence highlight the role and importance of energy demand reductions for realizing synergies across multiple sustainability objectives.

This article is available on the publisher’s website via restricted access.

Authors

Christoph von Stechow, David McCollum, Keywan Riahi, Jan C. Minx, Elmar Kriegler, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Jessica Jewell, Carmenza Robledo-Abad, Edgar Hertwich, Massimo Tavoni, Sevastianos Mirasgedis, Oliver Lah, Joyashree Roy, Yacob Mulugetta, Navroz K. Dubash, Johannes Bollen, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, and Ottmar Edenhofer

Specifications

Publication title
Integrating Global Climate Change Mitigation Goals with Other Sustainability Objectives: A Synthesis
Publication date
24 September 2015
Publication type
Publication
Magazine
Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Product number
2311