RESUMO
Siloed-approaches may fuel the misguided development of hydropower and subsequent target-setting under the sustainable development goals (SDGs). While hydropower development in the Indus basin is vital to ensure energy security (SDG7), it needs to be balanced with water use for fulfilling food (SDG2) and water (SDG6) security. Existing methods to estimate hydropower potential generally focus on: only one class of potential, a methodological advance for either of hydropower siting, sizing, or costing of one site, or the ranking of a portfolio of projects. A majority of them fall short in addressing sustainability. Hence, we develop a systematic framework for the basin-scale assessment of the sustainable hydropower potential by integrating considerations of the water-energy-food nexus, disaster risk, climate change, environmental protection, and socio-economic preferences. Considering the case of the upper Indus, the framework is developed by combining advances in literature, insights from local hydropower practitioners and over 30 datasets to represent real-life challenges to sustainable hydropower development, while distinguishing between small and large plants for two run-of-river plant configurations. The framework first addresses theoretical potential and successively constrains this further by stepwise inclusion of technical, economical, and sustainability criteria to obtain the sustainable exploitable hydropower potential. We conclude that sustainable hydropower potential in complex basins such as the Indus goes far beyond the hydrological boundary conditions. Our framework enables the careful inclusion of factors beyond the status-quo technological and economic criterions to guide policymakers in hydropower development decisions in the Indus and beyond. Future work will implement the framework to quantify the different hydropower potential classes and explore adaptation pathways to balance SDG7 with the other interlinked SDGs in the Indus.
RESUMO
Hopes are high that removing fossil fuel subsidies could help to mitigate climate change by discouraging inefficient energy consumption and levelling the playing field for renewable energy. In September 2016, the G20 countries re-affirmed their 2009 commitment (at the G20 Leaders' Summit) to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and many national governments are using today's low oil prices as an opportunity to do so. In practical terms, this means abandoning policies that decrease the price of fossil fuels and electricity generated from fossil fuels to below normal market prices. However, whether the removal of subsidies, even if implemented worldwide, would have a large impact on climate change mitigation has not been systematically explored. Here we show that removing fossil fuel subsidies would have an unexpectedly small impact on global energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions and would not increase renewable energy use by 2030. Subsidy removal would reduce the carbon price necessary to stabilize greenhouse gas concentration at 550 parts per million by only 2-12 per cent under low oil prices. Removing subsidies in most regions would deliver smaller emission reductions than the Paris Agreement (2015) climate pledges and in some regions global subsidy removal may actually lead to an increase in emissions, owing to either coal replacing subsidized oil and natural gas or natural-gas use shifting from subsidizing, energy-exporting regions to non-subsidizing, importing regions. Our results show that subsidy removal would result in the largest CO2 emission reductions in high-income oil- and gas-exporting regions, where the reductions would exceed the climate pledges of these regions and where subsidy removal would affect fewer people living below the poverty line than in lower-income regions.