An Integrated Assessment Framework to Incorporate Additional Influencing Mechanisms to Alberta’s Climate Policy
Creators: name: Narayan, Vrinda Shankar
Publisher: name: Graduate Studies
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: input-output analysis
subject: structural path analysis
subject: single region input-output model
subject: symmetric input-output table
subject: hybrid life cycle assessment
subject: path exchange method
subject: climate policy
subject: policy instrument
subject: dynamic efficiency
subject: endogenous technological change
subject: product category rules
subject: life cycle assessment
subject: carbon footprint of a product
subject: Environmental Sciences

description: The context of regional circumstances or the sub-national level has been explored in this research to evaluate mitigation of climate change and policy in action for the provincial region of Alberta. In view of Canada’s commitments under the Paris Agreement; there has been an increased focus at both the national and sub-national levels on broader action for emissions reduction, and to improve policy coverage and financial flows to achieve policy goals. The implementation of actions outlined in the nationally determined contribution (NDC) by Canada and setting of more ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets will depend upon the sustainable transformation of regional economies; that in turn will depend upon the specificities of economic structure, emissions profile, policy design, and an assessment of enabling conditions to influence outcomes. Within this emerging context, the climate policy of Alberta and the regulatory instrument that implements the policy goals have been evaluated to assess the regulatory coverage of all sectors of the economy and the effectiveness of the instrument to advance endogenous technological change in the province. An additional theme emerging from initial findings indicates that apart from high-performance benchmarks for some products, there is no policy basis to quantify and communicate partial or full carbon footprint of products and to develop standards-based methodologies to unpack the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of domestic goods and services. It is perceived that such a framework would be particularly useful in deriving benchmarks, in emissions reduction for products with complex value chains, and for the management of materials efficiency in industrial processes. The research design follows the case study approach that takes a holistic view of the case and its context. In this research study, the regulatory instrument that implements Alberta’s climate policy is the “unit of analysis” or the “case”. The context of the case is defined by the jurisdictional bound of the instrument meaning all sectors of the Alberta economy and the geographic bound defined by the provincial region of Alberta; where the release of CO2, CH4, and other specified gases is regulated. From the process of case design, four main modules have emerged for analysis that focus on the interface between the economy and environment at the level of domestic economic activity, products, and technologies. These modules correspond to the structured analysis of provincial data using an environmentally extended single region input-output (SRIO) model to analyze the regional and sectoral context for climate change in Alberta, hybrid life cycle assessment (HLCA) to determine the coverage of a product’s carbon intensive processes by regulation, evaluation of dynamic efficiency of the regulatory instrument to gauge endogenous technological change over time, and an exploratory study to assess the coverage of domestic goods and services by product category rules (PCR). The findings from the four modules of study indicate that analyses pertaining to domestic economic activity; development of product policy for carbon intensive products; and multi-criteria evaluation of Alberta’s regulatory instrument can become the basis to derive an additonal climate policy pillar for Alberta’s Climate Leadership Plan. The climate policy pillar can be structured through the integrated assessment (IA) of these concepts such that it encapsulates the action of ‘implementing programs and measures related to broadening the coverage of sources releasing specified gases in Alberta while establishing operational and technological solutions for the purpose of reducing or limiting such emissions’.