Climate change mitigation

Summary

Climate change mitigation is action to limit climate change by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases or removing those gases from the atmosphere. The recent rise in global average temperature is mostly due to emissions from burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Mitigation can reduce emissions by transitioning to sustainable energy sources, conserving energy, and increasing efficiency. It is possible to remove carbon dioxide () from the atmosphere by enlarging forests, restoring wetlands and using other natural and technical processes. Experts call these processes carbon sequestration. Governments and companies have pledged to reduce emissions to prevent dangerous climate change in line with international negotiations to limit warming by reducing emissions. Solar energy and wind power have the greatest potential for mitigation at the lowest cost compared to a range of other options.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation

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Provide the conceptual, technical and methodological understanding of measuring and evaluating the production/consumption decisions on the environmental, social and economic performance of products and services over their life cycle.

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The course introduces non economists to the economic analysis of climate change: economic activity and climate change, estimation of climate impacts, optimal mitigation and adaptation, national and international climate policy, instruments for climate policy.

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Performance evolution and modeling of PEM fuel cell systems

Nicolas Roggo

In the context of climate change mitigation, different alternatives to reduce the atmospheric CO2 emissions are; increasing the efficiency, switching to renewable resource and reduce emissions from fossil resources by CO2 capture and storage (CCS) . Hydrogen is considered as potential alternative to cover the energy needs by using it as a fuel in internal combustion engines or fuel cells, or as chemical source. In proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, also known as polymer exchange membrane fuel cells, pure hydrogen fuelis combined with the oxygen from the atmosphere to produce water, heat and electricity. Many research has been done in recent years on fuel cell systems leading to higher efficiencies. The performance is influenced by the membrane properties, the catalysts, the number of cells and the operating conditions. For studying the performance of fuel cell systems process modeling is a well-known approach. Here the evolution of fuel cell efficiency, especially of PEMFC is studied within the aim of updating previously developed PEMFC process models to integrate them with different hydrogen production processes using fossil and renewable resources in order to assess the competitiveness on the energy market.

2012

Reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions is not the only solution

Justine Brun

With the increasing strength and frequency of climate change events, the urgency to mitigate climate change impact is ever so important. Canada reported his Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) and submitted its ambition to reduce his Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by 40-45% by 2030 compared to 2005 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Interest for energy system modelling has been increasing for planning future energy systems, as a result of growing concern for sustainable development and transition towards renewable energies. Nevertheless, planning a decarbonization of energy system can potentially lead to environmental burden shifting, and can increase impacts on other environmental impacts such as ecosystem quality or human health. Thus, this project aims towards integrating Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and more specifically Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) within Energy Systems Modelling, in order to minimize not only climate change impacts, but human health and ecosystem quality. In addition, a dual spatial resolution was integrated in the model in order to increase data precision and computational efficiency. The results show that a low-carbon energy system, based on the optimization of GHG emissions allows to greatly reduce all the environmental impacts under analysis, compared to an all economic- based energy system, but a multi-objective optimization allows to simultaneously reduce impacts on ecosystem quality and human health, while reducing GHG emissions and keeping good economical and technical performances. The results also show that it is theoretically possible for Canada to keep on track with their emission reduction ambition by 2030, by deploying more renewable energies. This project does not allow assessing Canada’s potential to reach net-zero emissions, as environmental impacts from carbon capture technologies are still to be characterized and integrated in the model.

2022

SARS-CoV2 spread is hard to control, as asymptomatic people contribute to transmission. Currently, Covid-19 mitigation imposes social distancing and isolates the diseased. This slows down virus spread, eases stress on health care systems and thereby reduces the death toll. However, this strategy takes a high economic toll, and virus transmission will surge again if measures are lifted. App-based contact tracing of symptomatic cases and isolating their contacts has been proposed as an alternative, but may not suffice for mitigation, as asymptomatic infections remain unidentified. Here, we evaluate complementary mitigation strategies relying on virus-RNA testing to detect and quarantine both, symptomatic and asymptomatic cases. Epidemic dynamics modeling shows that stopping the pandemic by mass testing alone is unrealistic, as we lack enough tests. However, realistic numbers of tests may suffice in a smart-testing strategy, e.g. when biasing tests towards people with exceptionally high numbers of contacts. These people are at particularly high risk to become infected (with or without symptoms) and transmit the virus. A mitigation strategy combining smart testing with contact counting (STeCC) and contact tracing in one app would reduce R0 by 2.4-fold (e.g. from R0=2.4 to R0=1) with realistic test numbers (≈166 per 100'000 people per day) when a realistic fraction of smartphone owners use the app (≈72%, i.e. ≈50% in total population). Thereby, STeCC expands the portfolio of mitigation strategies and may help easing social distancing without compromising public health.

2020