Meisel, C. (2023, October 6). Opinion: Renewables are America’s pathway to energy independence. The Colorado Sun. https://coloradosun.com/2023/10/06/renewable-energy-independence-gasoline-electricity-colorado-opinion/

There’s no better way to reduce pressure on gas prices — or take away Putin’s leverage.

Gas prices in the U.S. are at an 11-month high, reducing the purchasing power of Coloradans and bolstering stubbornly high inflation. Earlier this year, U.S. ally Japan, in a pinch for energy, has already had to negotiate an exception to the U.S.-imposed price cap on Russian oil that is meant to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to end his war in Ukraine. Critical U.S. partners elsewhere in the world, such as Singapore, are also feeling pain at the pump.

Moyer, J. D., Pirzadeh, A., Irfan, M., Solórzano, J. R., Stone, B. A., Xiong, Y., Hanna, T., & Hughes, B. B. (2023, October 2). How many people will live in poverty because of climate change? A macro-level projection analysis to 2070. Climatic Change 176(13). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03611-3.

Fossil fuel-based economic development both causes climate change and contributes to poverty alleviation, creating tensions across societal efforts to maintain growth, limit climate damage, and improve human development. While many studies explore key aspects of this dilemma, few direct attention to the pathways from climate change through socioeconomic development to the future of poverty. We build on projections of global temperature change (representative concentration pathways) and country-specific economic development (economic growth and income distribution across the shared socioeconomic pathways) to model how climate change may affect future poverty with the International Futures (IFs) model, projecting poverty across income thresholds for 175 countries through 2070. Central tendency scenarios with climate effects compared with scenarios that do not model climate change show that climate change-attributable extreme poverty will grow to 25 million people by 2030 (range: 18 to 30), 40 million by 2050 (range: 9 to 78), and 32 million by 2070 (range: 4 to 130) though overall levels of global poverty decline. If climatic tipping points are passed, the climate-attributable extreme poverty grows to 57 million people by 2030 (range: 40–72), 78 million by 2050 (range: 18–193), and 56 million by 2070 (range: 7–306). To mitigate baseline effects of climate change on extreme poverty, an improvement of global income inequality of 10% is required (range: 5–15%).

Moyer, J. D. (2023, September 25). Modeling transformational policy pathways on low growth and negative growth scenarios to assess impacts on socioeconomic development and carbon emissions. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 15996. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-42782-

Degrowth advocates argue for structural transformations in how economies and societies prioritize material wealth accumulation to reduce the negative effects of future anthropogenic climate change. Degrowth proponents argue that human economic activity could be lessened, and societies transformed to prioritize improved wellbeing, reducing the threat of climate change. This paper explores implications of alternative patterns of economic growth with transformational policy pathways (i.e., redistribution) to assess what effects economic growth and broader policies have on changing patterns of human development across both the Global North and South. Using the International Futures model, this article shows that negative growth and societal transformations in the Global North are possible without dramatically damaging long-term global socioeconomic development, though these interventions do not solve the global climate crisis, reducing future cumulative carbon emissions by 10.5% through 2100. On the other hand, a global negative growth scenario will significantly reduce future cumulative carbon emissions (45%) but also dramatically undermines the pursuit of global development goals, like the elimination of poverty. Even with global policies that significantly increase cash transfers to the poor and retired, dramatically improve income inequality, and eliminate military spending, the Global Negative Growth Big Push scenario leads to an increase of 15 percentage points in global extreme poverty by 2100.

Full Citation: Mekonnen, S. M., Mbate, M., Osman-Elasha, B., Akol, C., Janneh, A et Al., (2022). 2022 Africa Sustainable Development Report. UNDP. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2023-01/Africa%20Sustainable%20Development-Report_2

The Coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate change have all hampered Africa’s efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Halfway towards 2030, most African countries are struggling to meet most SDG targets. Without deliberate policies to accelerate progress towards the SDGs, by 2030, at least 492 million people will be left in extreme poverty and at least 350 million people by 2050.

The report evaluates Africa’s progress towards the SDGs and the objectives of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 in the context of the triple crises of COVID-19, climate change, and the war in Ukraine, which are all adversely impacting the continent’s performance on both agendas.

Sellers, S. (2020). Cause of death variation under the shared socioeconomic pathways. Climatic Change. doi:10.1007/s10584-020-02824-0

Climate change will create numerous risks for human health, including impacts associated with temperature extremes, diarrheal diseases, and undernutrition. Such risks, along with other socioeconomic and development trends, will affect cause-of-death patterns experienced in the coming decades. This study explores future mortality trends using the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP) framework, a widely utilized tool for understanding socioeconomic development trends in a world with climate change. Existing projections for GDP, urbanization, and demographic trends based on SSP narratives are incorporated into an integrated assessment model, International Futures (IFs), in order to project mortality levels by cause of death for all countries from 2020 to 2100. Under more optimistic SSPs, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) rise as a proportion of all deaths, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, while more pessimistic SSPs suggest a continued high burden of largely preventable communicable diseases. In highincome countries, significant continued burdens of NCDs are projected for the remainder of the century under all SSPs. Comparisons are also made to recent cause-of-death projections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) to assess how the IFs and IHME models vary.

Sanderson, Benjamin M., and Brian C. O'Neill. 2020. “Assessing the costs of historical inaction on climate change.” Scientific Reports 10, 9173 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66275-4

Gao, Jing, and Brian C. O'Neill. 2020. "Mapping global urban land for the 21st century with data-driven simulations and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways." Nature Communications 11, 2302 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-15788-7

O'Neill, Brian C., Leiwen Jiang, Samir KC, Regina Fuchs, Shonali Pachauri, Emily K. Laidlaw, Tiantian Zhang, Wei Zhou and Xiaolin Ren. 2020.

“The effect of education on determinants of climate change risks.” Nature Sustainability 3, 520–528 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0512-y

O'Neill, Brian C. and Steve Hedden. 2018. "Xcel Energy carbon emissions targets and limiting warming to less than 2 degrees C." Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures, University of Denver, Denver, CO.

Director of Research Brian O'Neill and former Pardee Center Lead System Administrator Steve Hedden published a report evaluating Xcel Energy's recently announced goals for carbon emissions reductions. Their findings, which are incorporated in Xcel Energy's own report outlining their goals, conclude that the company's aims of reducing emissions 80% by 2030 and delivering carbon-free electricity by 2050 are consistent with targets in the Paris Climate Agreement to limit warming to 2 degrees C or less.