This research assesses three key energy sustainability objectives: energy security improvement, climate change mitigation, and the reduction of air pollution and its human health impacts. We illustrate how the common practice of narrowly focusing on singular issues ignores potentially enormous synergies, highlighting the need for a paradigm shift toward more holistic policy approaches. Our analysis of a large ensemble of alternate energy-climate futures, developed using MESSAGE, an integrated assessment model, shows that climate change policy offers a strategic entry point along the path to energy sustainability in several dimensions. Decarbonization will lead to improved air quality, thereby reducing energy-related health impacts worldwide (22-32 million fewer disabilityadjusted life years in 2030). At the same time, low-carbon technologies and energyefficiency improvements can help to further the energy security goals of individual countries and regions by promoting a more dependable, resilient, and diversified energy portfolio. The cost savings of these climate policy synergies are potentially enormous: $100-600 billion annually by 2030 in reduced pollution control and energy security expenditures (0.1-0.7% of GDP). Novel aspects of this work include an explicit quantification of the health-related co-benefits of present and future air pollution control policies; an analysis of how future constraints on regional trade could influence energy security; a detailed assessment of energy expenditures showing where financing needs to flow in order to achieve the multiple energy sustainability objectives; and a quantification of the relationships between different fulfillment levels for energy security and air pollution goals and the probability of reaching the 2°C climate target. • Hence, the scenarios stretch the potential development of the energy system in several dimensions by fulfilling the individual objectives to varying degrees of satisfaction: Weak, Intermediate, and Stringent (see Figure 1). • Because of the major cuts in PM2.5 that decarbonization brings about (left-hand panel of Figure 2), energyrelated health impacts worldwide are reduced by up to 22 million DALYs in 2030 compared to our baseline scenario, which assumes that no new climate policies are implemented and that only currently legislated and planned air pollution policies are enacted (the CLE case). Abstract• A significant portion of climate mitigation costs can be compensated for by reduced pollution control requirements (right-hand panel of Figure 2). Our scenarios indicate cost savings of up to US$500 billion per year by 2030, almost half the level of today's investments into the global energy system. Key Finding: climate change mitigation can be an important entry point for achieving society's energy security goals• Decarbonization of the energy system can simultaneously reduce import dependence (improved sovereignty) and increase energy diversity (improved resilience), two key indicators of a more secure energy supply mix (left-hand pa...
Sustainable development objectives surrounding water and energy systems are increasingly interdependent, and yet the associated performance metrics are often distinct. Regional planners tasked with designing future supply systems therefore require multi-criteria analysis methods and tools to determine a suitable combination of technologies and scale of investments. Previous research focused on optimizing system development strategy with respect to a single design objective, leading to potentially negative outcomes for other important sustainability metrics. This paper addresses this limitation, and presents a flexible and interactive multi-criteria model analysis framework and its application to long-term energy and freshwater supply planning at national or regional scales. The framework incorporates a linear systems-engineering model of the coupled supply technologies and inter-provincial electricity and water transmission networks. The multi-criteria analysis approach enables the interactive specification of diverse decision-making preferences for disparate criteria, and leads to learning on trade-o↵s between the resulting criteria values of the corresponding Pareto-optimal solutions. A case study of the water-stressed nation of Saudi Arabia explores preferences combining aspiration and reservation levels in terms of cost, water sustainability and CO 2 emissions. The analysis reveals a suite of trade-o↵ solutions, in which potential integrated system configurations remain relatively ambitious from both an economic and environmental perspective. The identified cost savings would have a major impact on the a↵ordability of water and electricity services in Saudi Arabia.
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