Impact Assessment of Climate and Energy Policy Scenarios: A Multi-criteria Approach

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, numerous studies have shown significant changes in the global climate which negatively affect life in many aspects. The perpetual problems due to climate change impacts have created the urgent need to find efficient ways to tackle them. In this frame, European countries are moving towards the creation of energy and climate policies in order to achieve specific targets and mitigate the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. They have defined a number of scenarios comprised of different targets' combinations and ambition levels. The targets to be achieved are defined as to the CO 2 emission reduction, the improvement in energy efficiency and the increase of the share of renewable energy sources until 2030. Thus, the aim is to lead EU to counteract the increasing energy demand and its negative effects on the environment as well as to abate the fossil fuel dependency. In this context, the scope of the particular paper is to examine which of the defined scenarios could respond adequately to the European region's profile and which could affect positively living conditions. Subsequently, the research focuses on the assessment of each alternative climate and energy policy scenario and its socioeconomic, environmental and energy impacts with the application of multi-criteria decision analysis. The method used in the herein analysis is the PROMETHEE II, which ranks the proposed scenarios based on the decisionmakers' preferences. In order to ensure the robustness of the results, a sensitivity analysis is also performed.

Scenario analysis and climate change: a literature review via text analytics

“…Energy production, energy consumption, electricity generation and the way energy is produced (along with technology) inevitably lead to the issue of energy efficiency and the use of renewable sources (Neofytou et al ., 2018), proving the central relevance of multi-criteria decision analysis to assess the future energy implications of a not-linear process in which “damages rise disproportionately with global average temperature increase” (Moriarty and Honnery, 2021). In scenario analysis, the essentiality of data referring to energy and emissions has created an increasing need for the assessment of low-carbon pathways with individual or integrated projections (Paltsev, 2020).…”

Assessing the Performance of Sustainable Development Goals of EU Countries: Hard and Soft Data Integration

“…Energies 2020, 13, 3439 7 of 25 Calculations and analyses were based on various indicators. Among the most commonly used were renewable energy shares/amount as indicators of energy sustainability [4,5,[11][12][13]15,[17][18][19][20]22,23,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]37,38] and the associated greenhouse gas emission [13,15,18,19,21,22,24,26,27,[32][33][34]36,37].…”

“…Papers that use qualitative data either present it as an evaluation of policies and initiatives transformed into simple dummy variables [15,16], or consider it indirectly as various ranking scores [11]. In some instances, the data is presented as expert opinions [17] or importance weights determined by experts [18]. Qualitative data often contains more information.…”

Pt Nanoparticles Supported on Mesoporous Graphitic Carbon Nitride as Catalysts for Hydrolytic Dehydrogenation of Ammonia Borane

“…Considering the increasing energy demand of the world, which is mostly supplied by fossil fuels at the present time, and the depletion of fossil fuels one day in the future, finding renewable, sustainable, and environmentally friendly energy sources is urgently needed for a sustainable future. , In this respect, hydrogen as an energy carrier has been considered as one of the most promising candidates to replace the fossil-fuel-based energy society because of its large energy density (143 MJ/kg) and zero-emission property, meaning it releases only pure water steam . However, the safe and efficient storage/transportation of hydrogen with the desired gravimetric/volumetric capacity are still the main ongoing obstacles in front of its widely usage for vehicular applications .…”