Abstract
The report aims at identification of climate change impacts and linkages to key endpoints, which is further employed within the determination of the costs and benefits of mitigation policy. The endpoints covered include land use and ecosystem amenities and valuation of ancillary benefits associated with mitigation measures of greenhouse gas emissions (health effects related to heat, air pollution, traffic noise etc.).
Within the report, several issues important for the analysis of costs and benefits that may occur far in the future or in different geographical areas are covered, such as estimation of future population changes and case studies in developing countries. We provide a review of monetary values of non-market benefits associated with ecosystems that are sensitive to climate change, where both primary and secondary studies are investigated in order to provide a synthesis of outcomes.
Great regard is dedicated especially to leisure activities in forest ecosystems, where the results of primary non-market valuation studies associated with biodiversity change are explained with the use of meta-analysis. We also review ancillary benefits of GHG abatement in Europe and in developing countries.
The review shows relative wealth of data on causal pathways and monetary estimates for estimation of direct impacts, but also substantial gaps in the knowledge. Concerning abatement of ground-level air pollutants, damages attributable to releases of air quality pollutants include SO2, NOX, particulate matters (PM10 and PM2.5), and heavy metals, from energy generation are expressed in monetary terms.
The damage assessment is based on the impact pathway approach as developed with the ExternE project series. A case study is done in China, which has benefited substantially from air pollution reductions in recent years.
Another case study concerns the freight road corridor Brindisi-Koln, for which co-benefits from GHG mitigation policies have been evaluated.