CAS- Climate: SRS-- U.S.-China: A Comparative Analysis of the Regional Dynamics Influencing Decarbonization Pathways

A growing number of cities, states, and regions are setting net-zero emissions targets to motivate and guide the transition to a low-carbon economy. The pathways these regions follow to achieve these goals will be unique and influenced both by positive emissions operations, such as from local manufacturing capacity, and the potential to offset emissions with newer technologies, such as bioenergy with carbon capture.

The goal of this project is to create the modeling tools needed to understand how net-zero plans will be influenced by regional conditions and how these factors will affect global outcomes. Currently used global-scale models do not have the ability to capture many of the regional scale characteristics that will influence net-zero pathways. By focusing on three representative regions in the US, while Chinese partners at Tsinghua University and the China University of Petroleum-Beijing study three representative regions in China using the same techniques, this project will build an improved understanding of how regional economic and environmental characteristics will help accelerate, or in some cases, impede, efforts to decarbonize the global economy.

The tools developed in this project can be used by decision-makers when choosing different net-zero pathways. Additionally, these tools, along with research results, will be used to develop a U.S.-Chinese collaborative course on climate leadership skills. This international collaboration between the two greatest greenhouse gas emitting countries will lead to better strategies for lowering emissions in the United States that are complementary to those in China, avoiding pathways that could inadvertently create greater greenhouse gas emissions globally.

The goal of this work is to develop fundamental engineering, economic, and policy understanding of the dynamics of net-zero plans at the state or provincial level. This project will extend the suite of tools that decision makers have to understand how regions might work together or against each other and how regional-scale implementation of net-zero policies, land use scenarios, or infrastructures will ultimately drive global-scale targets.

Conducting this research as a collaboration between the United State and China, the top two greenhouse gas emitting countries in the world, is critical to create frameworks that can lead the rest of the world to a low carbon future. Integrated assessment models for the United States and China will be extended using the tools of industrial ecology to include consideration of regional-scale resource availability, technological infrastructure, and preferences.

The team will work with the global change assessment model (GCAM), its two country-specific models, GCAM-USA and GCAM-China, and computable general equilibrium models of regional economic dynamics. Three states and three provinces will be selected to understand a range of impacts associated with net-zero plans and characterize topologies of decarbonization in regions that are dominated by either agriculture, manufacturing, or services.

The resulting regional models will then be used to inform technology preference and policy pathways in GCAM-USA and GCAM-China.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.