BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Assessment climate change adaptation policies for surface water availability in Mediterranean Europe
BC3-Basque Centre for Climate Change Sede Building 1, 1st floor, Scientific Park of the University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Bizkaia, SpainProf. Luis Maria Garrote
Full Professor at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM)
Dept. of Civil Engineering; Hydraulic and Energy
Population growth, scarce water resources, climate change, environmental concerns and economic development are just a few of many factors that challenge water management in Southern Europe. Most climate models agree that Southern Europe will face a significant drying trend during the second half of the century, challenging water policy in the region to ensure future sustainability. In this seminar we discuss how much water demand might be met with future hydrologic regime from the policy perspective. We present a methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative policy options to ensure adequate supply to irrigation demands. The methodology is based on the application of the WAAPA (Water Availability and Adaptation Policy Assessment) model, which performs the simulation of water resources systems at the monthly time scale and allows the estimation of the demand-reliability curve in every subbasin of the river network. The model was applied to 47 River Basin Districts in Southern Europe to estimate water availability under different climate change projections and several adaptation policy scenarios. The target of adaptation policy was defined in terms of maintaining an acceptable reliability of water supply to irrigation demands in future time horizons. Several possible options, like reducing irrigation
demands, increasing the efficiency of water use or changing the allocation to environmental flows were analyzed and compared in quantitative terms. The results show significant regional disparities in effectiveness of the different adaptation policies across Europe
BC3 Seminars: How to write scientific articles?
BC3-Basque Centre for Climate Change Sede Building 1, 1st floor, Scientific Park of the University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Bizkaia, SpainProf. Erik Dietzenbacher
Full Professor in Interindustry Economics at the University of Groningen
Erik Dietzenbacher (1958) obtained his MSc in Econometrics (1982) and his PhD in Economics (1991) from the University of Groningen. Currently he is Full Professor in Interindustry Economics at the University of Groningen. He is also Affiliate Research Professor at the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Guest Professor at the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (GUCAS) in Beijing.
He was the project coordinator of “World Input-Output Database: Construction and Applications” (WIOD), a large-scale collaborative research project that was funded by the EU in its 7th Framework Programme, in which 11 international institutes participate, and which ran from 2009-2012. (All data can be downloaded for free at the WIOD website.)
Experiencias, Colaboraciones y Retos en Medio ambiente y Biodiversidad 2020
El próximo jueves 29 de mayo se celebrará en las instalaciones de Vicomtech-IK4 el Workshop “Experiencias, Colaboraciones y Retos en Medio Ambiente y Biodiversidad 2020” en el marco del proyecto MONNA (http://www.monna-project.eu/) en la que participara la investigadora de BC3, Elena Pérez de Miñana.
El evento comenzará a las 10h y, en el transcurso de la mañana, contará con las intervenciones de ponentes de gran prestigio en el ámbito de la biodiversidad y el medio ambiente, además de la presentación del proyecto MONNA.
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: How nuclear power plants in Spain have reacted to the introduction of renewable energy
Dr. Margaret Armstrong
Cerna, Centre d’Economie Industrielle MINES, ParisTech
The introduction of renewable energy (notably wind and solar power) into the energy mix in Europe is causing massive problems for traditional power companies. According to a recent issue of The Economist , the market capitalization of the top 20 European utilities has dropped by $1.3 trillion since 2008, with German companies being the most severely effected. E.ON’s income from conventional power generation (fossil fuels and nuclear) has fallen by more than 30% since 2010. In this paper we investigate what companies are doing to become more profitable. Our hypothesis is that traditional power producers have subtly changed their bidding strategies for selling electricity on the day-ahead and intraday markets. We test this hypothesis using the bids by nuclear power-plants to sell electricity on the Spanish day-ahead market over the period from 2002 to 2012. The Spanish market was chosen because the individual bids made by each producer are available to the public, making it possible to track the evolution in each power plant’s bidding strategy. Secondly, renewable energy accounts for 35% of the power generated in Spain, with windpower providing more than 18% . We chose to focus on nuclear plants because even though there are only 9 of them in Spain, they contribute about 20% of the electricity production.
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Implications of risk perceptions for long term future of nuclear energy in India: A sensitivity analysis around nuclear energy cost within an integrated assessment modeling framework
Dr. Vaibhav Chaturved
Research Fellow at Council on Energy, Environment and Water, New Delhi (India).
Nuclear energy for power generation is expected to be a vital pillar of India’s energy and emission mitigation policy. However, there are divergent views from various quarters about the risk and liability associated with nuclear power plants. We undertake a cost sensitivity analysis, within an integrated assessment modeling framework, for nuclear power generation and present its implications for India’s energy and climate policy in the long run. We find that nuclear energy is competitive when risk induced costs are low under non-climate intervention scenarios. However nuclear energy deployment is seriously curtailed under higher risk induced costs. Consequently, fossil energy takes higher share, thus increasing the emissions substantially. Interestingly, nuclear liability off sets climate liability under climate policy scenarios. We find that nuclear energy is competitive, in the long-run, even under high risk induced costs if policies aiming at stringent global climate stabilization are pursued. Reaching emission mitigation targets however becomes much more expensive as a result of higher nuclear energy costs. Our results suggest need for credible risk assessment and more effective communication to reduce the risk perception gap between supporters and skeptics of nuclear energy to delineate an optimal role for nuclear technology in the Indian energy system.
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: On Fraud and Certification of Corporate Social Responsibility
Dr. Carmen Arguedas
Departamento de Análisis Económico: Teoría Económica e Historia Económica, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
We analyze the strategic decision of firms to voluntarily certify corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in a context where other firms can falsely pretend to besocially responsible. Equilibrium outcomes are crucially determined by consumers’ beliefs about the credibility of firms’ CSR claims, which depend in turn on the(expected) fines for fraud. First, we show that an increase in such fines extends the likelihood of firms investing in CSR, at the expense of a reduced likelihood ofcertification. Second, fraud only arises when the fines for fraud are at intermediate levels and some CSR firms do not certify their practices. Third, the presence of fraudcomes at a cost for firms by inducing lower equilibrium prices than in settings with honest marketing. Forth, the coexistence of fraud and certification inducesdifferentiation price premia below marginal production costs and certification price premia above marginal certification costs. Lastly, social welfare rises as fines for fraud increase.
BC3 Seminars: Methodologies to analyze Urban Climate and improve thermal comfort from a planning perspective: the case of Bilbao
BC3-Basque Centre for Climate Change Sede Building 1, 1st floor, Scientific Park of the University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Bizkaia, SpainDr. Juan Angel Acero
Environmental Department of TECNALIA
Despite development of cities are including more sustainable aspects (e.g. reduction of energy consumption), urban climate still needs to be consolidated as an important variable in urban planning. In this sense, the analysis of urban climate requires a multi-scale approach. Results for Bilbao (Spain) are presented. In the mesoscale, an Urban Climate Map (UC-Map) is developed using a method based on GIS calculations, specific climatic measurements and urban climate expert knowledge. All the information is grouped in 5 information layers (building volume, building surface fraction, urban green areas, ventilation paths and slopes). The final UC-Map presents areas with relative homogeneous climate variables (i.e. climatopes) that are classified in terms of thermal comfort. Urban planning recommendations are defined. In the microscale, thermal comfort results extracted specofoc modelling in four urban spaces show the influence of regional climate conditions and the urban development type of each area. In both spatial scales, climate modelling should include specific measurement campaigns to validate results.
BC3-UPV/EHU Summer School 2014: “Climate Change Understanding the Challenge “
Miramar Palace Paseo Miraconcha, 48, San Sebastian, Gipuzkoa, SpainThe objective of the BC3 Summer School is to offer an updated and multidisciplinary view of the ongoing trends in climate change research. The BC3 Summer School is organized in collaboration with the University of the Basque Country and is a high quality and excellent summer course gathering leading experts in the field and students from top universities and research centres worldwide.
This fifth edition of the Summer School entitled “Climate Change Understanding the Challenge” will continue with the multidisciplinary approach
BC3-UPV/EHU Seminars: Social learning through economic experiments: an intervention in three rural water systems
BC3-Basque Centre for Climate Change Sede Building 1, 1st floor, Scientific Park of the University of the Basque Country, Leioa, Bizkaia, SpainProf. Juan Camilo Cárdenas
Professor, School of Economics, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (Colombia)
Economic experiments have traditionally been used as a tool for measuring human behavior in different contexts of social interaction. However, little has been discussed so far on the role of experiments as tools for learning and social change. Over the last year we conducted a series of educational interventions and measures of attitudes and behaviors on the use and conservation of water in three municipal aqueducts in Guasca (Colombia). In two of the three aqueducts we used economic experiments as a pedagogical tool for
understanding the effects of this activity on the behaviors and attitudes of rural households in the sample. We repeated the application of the games a few months later with most of the same sample of 200 participants. In one of these aqueducts we held workshops with the community to provide feedback on the results of the games. Our aim is to evaluate how attitudes and behavior of the households are affected by the participation in the experiments.
Workshop “International Livestock Modelling and Research Colloquium in Bilbao”
The LiveM Livestock Modelling and Research Colloquium, will be hosted by the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) from the 14-16th October in Bilbao .www.livem2014bilbao.com
The LiveM theme of the FACCE-JPI MACSUR Knowledge Hub brings together 30 institutes from 14 European countries with expertise in a diverse range of disciplines, from grassland and farm-scale modelling through to livestock disease and health research.
