Title of PhD thesis:
Compendium of Climate Change Econometrics
Title of trial lecture:
to be announced on 2 June
Trial lecture: 10:00
Public defence: 12.00
Nord University, Auditorium Petter Thomassen, A5
Assessment committee:
Professor Tommaso Proietti, University of Rome
Associate Professor/PhD Mikkel Bennedsen, Universitety of Århus
Professor Terje Mathisen, Nord University Business School (coordinator)
Supervisor:
Associate Professor Thomas Leirvik, Nord University Business School
Summary of thesis
Climate change is topical yet, complex with several dynamics spanning different disciplines. The 21st-century development pathway is characterized by a roller coaster of climate change events––because of natural resource exploitation, fossil fuel utilization, energy intensity, population growth, and environmental pollution. Under this global environmental threat, development cooperation made several efforts to rally economies into sustainable policies that mitigate current and future threats. The Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future”, outlines the importance of “protecting the environment while meeting current demand without compromising available resources, but leaving the environment as a bequest for future generations”. This infers the importance of achieving environmental sustainability through sustainable development, addressing institutional gaps, and developing policy measures that control urban challenges, resource-dependent, energy-intensive industrial processes, fossil-driven energy portfolio, biodiversity loss, ecosystem challenges, food security, population growth, and human resources. Climate change econometrics provides opportunities for assessing potential policy implications of historical alterations of climate events. Thus, understanding the various philosophical underpinnings of climate change and its impacts is useful in future policy development with mitigation effects. Here, we bring to the fore cyclical climate chain—a term coined to understand how climate change processes mimic typical “food chain”. Philosophical perspectives of existing pollution theories including energy-growth, pollution halo/haven, environmental convergence, displacement effects, and environmental Kuznets curve hypotheses are examined using econometric techniques. This compendium contributes to the extant literature in both spirit and letters while criticizing, contrasting, and/or validating the status quo in climate change econometrics. We incorporate the concept of sustainability in the hypotheses and research design useful in developing conceptual tools for policy formulation while highlighting the policy implications of empirical results. Our empirical studies presented herein demonstrate the complexity of climate change, however, climate change mitigation and adaptation to climate impacts are possible through climate-resilience pathways––coping mechanisms of new and existing systems to modulate the harmful effects of climate change on sustainable development.