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Key factors sustainability and digitalization – an analysis of countries performance and actions
(2022)
Climate change is an extremely relevant topic nowadays in everyday life, politics and even economy. Therefore, it is important to understand the dimension of this topic and be conscious about how it is affecting everyone’s life. Many people’s base of living is fading through for example crop failure or natural disasters. Next, businesses must also adapt since many governments have implemented emission caps which force organizations to restructure business processes to meet those goals. Adapting to new circumstances or ways of working is crucial to fight back menacing environmental changes and without coherent enforcement, the goal of combating global warming and tackling climate change can’t be achieved.
But how can these challenges be fought against in a meaningful way and matter in a long-term perspective? There were already some attempts made like setting a maximum for global warming worldwide. On the other hand, there is no country which can meet those in the required period of time. Next to battle the problem of global warming every country in the world has to take part and work together, or else the goals can’t be fulfilled, which can occur to be difficult and hard to execute in reality. If there is no coherency in enforcement the aim of fighting the global warming and climate change can’t be attained.
The essential query I want to obtain with this thesis is what the possibilities for countries through sustainability and digitalization to live and operate in a more renewable way are. Part of this work will be assessing Sweden’s progress and development in this field since they are pioneers in both key areas. Afterwards there will be a comparison to Morocco and Singapore which at first glance differ completely from each other to work out differences and common ground.
In the end contrasting key factors like climate and geography, politics or economy etc. will give insights about opportunities and unused potential in making the world more sustainable with the help of digitalization.
The technique of acquiring the data is mainly focused on news articles, tech, and business publications as well as governmental proclamation and reporting of environmental portals. The reasoning for this is that the topic is very up to date and the source of information needs to be as recent as possible.
The intention of the project is to generate understanding and awareness about how sustainability and digitalization can be drivers and work together in a complex sphere like environmental change.
Over many decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been increasing and negatively impacting the environment and promoting climate change. One sector that contributes heavily to these emissions is the food industry.
With the aim of reducing these environmental impacts, climate labeling has been introduced as one possible approach to target emissions related to consumer purchasing behavior. This thesis investigates consumer responses to the possible introduction of climate labeling of food products. Moreover, necessary criteria for such an implementation and the potential consequences in terms of increasing sustainability in the food industry are evaluated.
Findings indicate that a label can be effective and change consumer behavior if food labels meet specific label criteria such as an attractive design and little but comprehensible information. Moreover, other factors such as pricing of products can influence the success of food labels.
Regarding the overall food industry, a label could have positive effects but is dependent on changes on both consumer and producer sides following the label introduction. However, it is difficult to exactly evaluate the impact of a label on an entire industry, as green-house gas reductions caused by a label would be hard to measure specifically. Due to the lack of data, it is impossible to predict the actual impact of a climate label on the food industry, but it is possible to assume a positive tendency towards more sustainability.
Climate change is one of the most challenging topics to the world and has been subject to international negotiations for more than 25 years, one of the main players being the USA.
Game theory, on the other hand, is a popular tool from economics, frequently used to analyze strategic situations such as international negotiations. Together, the insights from these topics can help understand why the USA’s president Donald Trump has announced to quit the Paris Agreement and which consequences this might have for the US, other countries and for the future of international climate change negotiations. In order to assess the different implications, this thesis gives some theoretical background and presents game theoretic findings on climate change negotiations. It will be found that, from a game theoretic point of view, different reasons might have caused the USA to take this decision and that there is a chance that a withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement could have some effect on the future of climate protection. However, a precise assessment would require further research on the topic.
Global warming and its impacts on the environment, the human being and the economy are one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. With the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration being the main driver of global warming, the necessity arises to address the issue of carbon dioxide emissions. Next to the avoidance, the reduction and the compensation of emissions, negative emissions are moving into the focus of decision-makers in politics and in the economy. These can be created using either nature-based methods or negative emission technologies. The paper “Methods for generating negative emissions: Are negative emission technologies a climatically and economically viable alternative to nature-based methods?” aims to answer the research questions whether negative emission technologies are a more effective instrument to create negative emissions than nature-based methods and, under which circumstances an investment in these technologies is reasonable for a company.
The method used to answer the questions is a literature research to perform a comparison of two examples. The afforestation project Bonn Challenge serves as example for a nature-based method to create negative emissions while the Direct-Air-Capture plant “Orca” by the company climeworks AG is used as an example for a negative emission technology. A benefit analysis is conducted to assess the effect on carbon dioxide concentration and a net present value calculation is carried out to enable an investment decision under different scenarios.
The paper finds that Direct Air Capture is a more effective way to reduce the atmospheric carbon dioxide than the afforestation. The crucial advantage of the technology is the permanent storage of the removed carbon dioxide and the immediate carbon dioxide effect. Furthermore, the results of the net present value calculation imply that in the short-term an investment in negative emissions is not economical. In the long run, rising prices for emission certificates and the possibility to sell removed and stored carbon dioxide or to offer carbon dioxide removal as a service can make an investment in negative emission technologies like Direct Air Capture reasonable. A condition for that is that the cost of carbon dioxide removal with Direct Air Capture is reduced to 100 $/tCO2 between 2026 and 2031 depending on the applied interest rate.
Based on the found results, the paper suggests that from a climate protection perspective, negative emission technologies should not be seen as alternatives to nature-based methods but that different approaches to create negative emissions must be combined to meet climate targets. The paper also proposes that prices for emission certificates in the EU-ETS should be increased as soon as possible in order to promote an investment in negative emission technologies. Also, further research using more detailed data and covering more aspects is recommended.