Including biodiversity conservation in climate change decision making
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Azuero Pedraza, Cindy Giselle
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Abstract
Two major environmental challenges of our time are climate change and biodiversity conservation. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), bioenergy is expected to play a major role as a mitigation strategy for climate change. The projected scale of the deployment of bioenergy is big, resulting in large land requirements.
Being habitat loss the main driver of biodiversity loss, there is concern about the biodiversity impacts of these global large-scale deployments, and the potential conflict between climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Impacts on biodiversity have been assessed on an ex-post basis, using the results from decision making models and then estimating the impacts. Still, incorporating the biodiversity impacts in the decision making models has not yet been done. Given the potential to improve outcomes for biodiversity, and in this way alleviating the potential trade-off between climate change mitigation and biodiversity loss, in this thesis I focus on incorporating biodiversity impacts into optimization models used in the context of climate change mitigation.
In Chapter 1, I focus on the concept of biodiversity, what it is, and how we can measure it, and I propose a methodology to incorporate biodiversity impacts into optimization models. For this, I chose the Countryside Species-Area Relationship (cSAR) ecologic model and because of its non-linearity I propose three methods that can be used to integrate the chosen ecologic model into an optimization model. I also discuss the ethical assumptions behind the way biodiversity is incorporated via a constraint or via an objective function. Because of the computational advantages and representation of the nonlinear relation between habitat loss and biodiversity loss, the piecewise linear approximation (LaP) method is chosen.
In Chapter 2, I start with a land use change model and I focus on the trade-offs between transformation costs and biodiversity impacts. This is explored for a scenario that guarantees an exogenous amount of woody biomass supply, consistent with the target of keeping warming under 2ÂșC, compared to pre-industrial levels. I analyze the outcomes when we prioritize biodiversity versus when we prioritize costs, and assess the feasibility of the best case for biodiversity under this large-scale deployment of bioenergy.
One of the limitations of Chapter 2 is that it does not consider market dynamics, assuming that future demands for agricultural land, pastures and wood products are fixed. To address this and to explore how forest management decisions can be improved by accounting for its biodiversity impacts, in Chapter 3 I integrate a partial equilibrium economic model (GLOBIOM forest) for the forest industry with the cSAR ecologic model. I find that forest management decisions can be used to alleviate the potential trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation using bioenergy.
With these studies, I exemplify how the integration of environmental models, economic models, and operations research can be used to improve solutions and support policymaking in complex problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Also, in this way, I am demonstrating how industrial engineering tools can be used for decisions beyond the private sector and even become an essential contribution to addressing global sustainability problems.
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2023-07-25
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Dissertation