دانلود رایگان مقاله هزینه اجتماعی فورسینگ: پایه ای برای قیمت گذاری نمایندگیها

Abstract

An efficient climate policy is based on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and equates marginal abatement costs across all forcing agents affecting climate change. In CBA, the agents' contributions to radiative forcing (RF) must be consistently priced (i.e. the social cost of RF, occurring at a specific time, must be the same regardless of the agent causing it). We present a concept that enables doing so. The Social Cost of Forcing (SCF) is the monetary value of the social damage caused by marginal RF at a given instant (Wm− 2). Any forcing agent whose temporal decay profile and radiative efficiency are known can be priced based on it. Prices obtained for distinct agents are consistent in CBA, as long as the same SCF and discounting assumptions are applied. Hence, the SCF is a concise way to communicate social cost information: mutually consistent prices for any set of forcing agents can be obtained based on a single Integrated Assessment Model output, the SCF. We explain the theoretical foundations of the concept and illustrate its practical applications with two examples: (1) we derive SCF-based prices for CO2 and CH4, and (2) we estimate the social cost of albedo changes in a boreal forest stand.

6. Conclusions

We have shown that the method, originally proposed by Lutz and Howarth (2014) for pricing forest albedo, can be generalized to price forcers of any kind. Lutz and Howarth (2015) call their approach the DICE method, after the DICE model (Nordhaus, 1992, 2014) which they utilize in their calculations. However, as we show in this study, the method generalizes to other IAMs as well. We therefore suggest that the shadow price of marginal radiative forcing should be called the Social Cost of Forcing (SCF), as the concept is independent of any specific IAM. The SCF concept enables the consistent pricing of distinct forcers according to the social cost of their warming impacts. It has two properties that make it especially useful in climate policy and economics. First, it can be flexibly used to value forcers regardless of their type. Second, it is a concise, effective and transparent way to communicate information between economists, working with IAMs, and end-users wanting to incorporate the social value of the climatic impacts of various forcers into CBA or climate policy.