Abstract: Changes in temperature, precipitation, sea level and coastal storms will likely increase the vulnerability of infrastructure across the USA. Using models that analyze vulnerability, impacts and adaptation, this paper estimates impacts to railroad, roads, and coastal properties under three infrastructure management response scenarios: No Adaptation; Reactive Adaptation, and Proactive Adaptation. Comparing damages under each of these potential responses provides strong support for facilitating effective adaptation in these three sectors.

Under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario and without adaptation, overall costs are projected to range in the $100s of billions annually by the end of this century. The first (reactive) tier of adaptation action, however, reduces costs by a factor of 10, and the second (proactive) tier reduces total costs across all three sectors to the low $10s of billions annually. For the rail and road sectors, estimated costs for Reactive and Proactive Adaptation scenarios capture a broader share of potential impacts, including selected indirect costs to rail and road users, and so are consistently about a factor of 2 higher than prior estimates. 

The results highlight the importance of considering climate risks in infrastructure planning and management.

Abstract: We assess the contribution of India’s hard-to-abate sectors to the country’s current emissions and their likely future trajectory of development under different policy regimes. We employ an enhanced version of the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model to explicitly represent the following hard-to-abate sectors: iron and steel, non-ferrous metals (copper, aluminum, zinc, etc.), non-metallic minerals (cement, plaster, lime, etc.), and chemicals.

We find that without additional policies, the Paris Agreement pledges made by India for the year 2030 still can lead to an increasing use of fossil fuels and corresponding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with projected CO2 emissions from hard-to-abate sectors growing by about 2.6 times from 2020 to 2050. Scenarios with electrification, natural gas support, or increased resource efficiency lead to a decrease in emissions from these sectors by 15-20% in 2050, but without carbon pricing (or disruptive technology changes) emissions are not reduced relative to their current levels due to growth in output.

Carbon pricing that makes carbon capture and storage (CCS) economically competitive is critical for achieving substantial emissions reductions in hard-to-abate sectors, enabling emissionsreductions of 80% by 2050 relative to the scenario without additional policies.