Economy-wide impacts of behavioral climate change mitigation: linking agent-based and computable general equilibrium models

Niamir, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0285-5542, Ivanova, O., & Filatova, T. (2020). Economy-wide impacts of behavioral climate change mitigation: linking agent-based and computable general equilibrium models. Environmental Modelling & Software 134 e104839. 10.1016/j.envsoft.2020.104839.

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Project: Knowledge Based Climate Mitigation Systems for a Low Carbon Economy (COMPLEX, FP7 308601), Scaling up behavior and autonomous adaptation for macro models of climate change damage assessment (SCALAR, H2020 758014), Energy Demand Changes Induced by Technological and Social Innovations (EDITS)

Abstract

Households are responsible for a significant share of global greenhouse emissions. Hence, academic and policy discourses highlight behavioral changes among households as an essential strategy for combating climate change. However, formal models used to assess economic impacts of energy policies face limitations in tracing cumulative impacts of adaptive behavior of diverse households. The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of agent-based simulation models that quantify behavioral climate change mitigation relying on social science theories and micro-level survey data. Yet, these behaviorally-rich models usually operate on a small scale of neighborhoods, towns, and small regions, ignoring macro-scale social institutions such as international markets and rarely covering large areas relevant for climate change mitigation policy. This paper presents a methodology to scale up behavioral changes among heterogeneous individuals regarding energy choices while tracing their macroeconomic and cross-sectoral impacts. To achieve this goal, we combine the strengths of top-down computable general equilibrium models and bottom-up agent-based models. We illustrate the integration process of these two alien modeling approaches by linking data-rich macroeconomic with micro-behavioral models. Following a three-step approach, we investigate the dynamics of cumulative impacts of changes in individual energy use under three behavioral scenarios. Our findings demonstrate that the regional dimension is important in a low-carbon economy transition. Heterogeneity in individual socio-demographics (e.g. education and age), structural characteristics (e.g. type and size of dwellings), behavioral and social traits (e.g. awareness and personal norms), and social interactions amplify these differences, causing nonlinearities in diffusion of green investments among households and macro-economic dynamics.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Behavior change; Grassroots dynamics; Soft linking; environmental modelling; upscaling; computational economics
Research Programs: Transitions to New Technologies (TNT)
Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP)
Depositing User: Luke Kirwan
Date Deposited: 02 Sep 2020 10:45
Last Modified: 05 Jan 2024 13:33
URI: https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/16671

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