No abstract

Following the 2009 Pacific El Niño, a warm event developed in the tropical and subtropical North Atlantic during boreal spring of 2010 promoted a significant increase in the CO2 fugacity of surface waters. This, together with the relaxation of the prevailing wind fields, resulted in the reversal of the atmospheric CO2 absorption capacity of the tropical and subtropical North Atlantic. In the region 0–30°N, 62–10°W, this climatic event led to the reversal of the climatological CO2 sink of −29.3 Tg C to a source of CO2 to the atmosphere of 1.6 Tg C from February to May. The highest impact of this event is verified in the region of the North Equatorial Current, where the climatological CO2 uptake of −22.4 Tg for that period ceased during 2010 (1.2 Tg C). This estimate is higher than current assessments of the multidecadal variability of the sea-air CO2 exchange for the entire North Atlantic (20 Tg year−1), and highlights the potential impact of the increasing occurrence of extreme climate events over the oceanic CO2 sink and atmospheric CO2 composition.

We present an extension of the generalized RAS (GRAS) technique to a multi-regional (MR) or multi-national setting. The framework is applicable to updating/regionalizing/balancing any partitioned matrix that needs to conform to new row sums, column sums and additional non-overlapping aggregation constraints. The technique, which we refer to as MR-GRAS, also handles non-exhaustive constraints, in which case the missing values are endogenously generated in the updating process. We derive the closed-form solution of MR-GRAS, propose a simple iterative algorithm for its computation, and discuss the main analytical properties of the method as well as the normalization and interpretation of MR-GRAS multipliers. From a wide range of possible MR-GRAS applications, several updating frameworks of national and interregional supply and use tables are examined.

No abstract

The economic policy needs to pay increasingly more attention to the environmental issues, which requires the development of methodologies able to incorporate environmental, as well as macroeconomic, goals in the design of public policies. Starting from this observation, this article proposes a methodology based upon a Simonian satisficing logic made operational with the help of goal programming (GP) models, to address the joint design of macroeconomic and environmental policies. The methodology is applied to the Spanish economy, where a joint policy is elicited, taking into consideration macroeconomic goals (economic growth, inflation, unemployment, public deficit) and environmental goals (CO(2), NO( x ) and SO( x ) emissions) within the context of a computable general equilibrium model. The results show how the government can "fine-tune" its policy according to different criteria using GP models. The resulting policies aggregate the environmental and the economic goals in different ways: maximum aggregate performance, maximum balance and a lexicographic hierarchy of the goals.