Hubacek Klaus

University of Groningen | RUG · Energy and Sustainability Research Institute Groningen (ESRIG)

Decarbonized power systems are critical to mitigate climate change, yet methods to achieve a reliable and resilient near-zero power system are still under exploration. This study develops an hourly power system simulation model considering high-resolution geological constraints for carbon-capture-utilization-and-storage to explore the optimal solut...

The significant spike in global energy prices induced by the Russian-Ukrainian (RU) conflict is perceived as highly uncertain that may rise household living costs and adversely affect Sustainable Development Goals such as poverty elimination. However, the impacts on human wellbeing are entirely obscured by conventional economic analyses. Using the...

Applying the planetary boundary for the freshwater framework at the regional level is important in supporting local water management but is subject to substantial uncertainty. Previous estimates have not fully investigated the potential of trade in mitigating regional freshwater boundary (RFB) exceedance. Here, we estimate RFB based on the average...

Understanding the impact of climate fiscal policies on vulnerable groups is a prerequisite for equitable climate mitigation. However, there has been a lack of attention to the impacts of such policies on the elderly, especially the low-income elderly, in existing climate policy literature. Here, we quantify and compare the distributional impacts of...

Given that the global fleet of coal-fired power plants is mostly new, coal–biomass co-firing power plants with retrofitted carbon capture and storage (CBECCS) are regarded as a promising option for CO2 emissions reduction. However, the effectiveness of CBECCS remains largely unexplored. Here we develop a comprehensive assessment framework featuring...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to food consumption complement production-based or territorial accounts by capturing carbon leaked through trade. Here we evaluate global consumption-based food emissions between 2000 and 2019 and underlying drivers using a physical trade flow approach and structural decomposition analysis. In 2019, emissions...

The Basel Convention and prior studies mainly focused on the physical transboundary movements of hazardous waste (transporting waste from one region to another for cheaper disposal). Here, we take China, the world’s largest waste producer, as an example and reveal the virtual hazardous waste flows in trade (outsourcing waste by importing waste-inte...

Capital assets such as machinery and infrastructure contribute substantially to CO2 emissions over their lifetime. Unique features of capital assets such as their long durability complicate the assignment of capital-associated CO2 emissions to final beneficiaries. Whereas conventional approaches allocate emissions required to produce capital assets...

At a time when the links that bind the oil industry – both corporate and state-owned - to finance and governments seemed inextricable and unquestionable, some major changes have occurred that have prompted major financial players and governments to seek a separation strategy. From the Paris Agreement to the change of administration in the United St...

There has been a longstanding debate about the impact of international trade on the environment and human well-being, yet there is little known about such environment and human well-being trade-off. Here, we explore the effect of international trade on the carbon intensity of human well-being (CIWB) globally under the current global trade system an...

Seafood plays a critical role in promoting a nutritious and climate-friendly food system but faces challenges from marine contamination that pose food safety risks. To address these challenges, we developed a Marine Pollution-induced Food System Risk Assessment and Response (MP-FSRAR) model to assess the impact of consumer perceptions of marine pol...

Carbon taxation is regarded as an essential tool for curbing carbon emissions but can be regressive and increase poverty, and moreover lacks universal acceptance among the public and policymakers. Recycling the tax revenue raised to vulnerable households is one promising solution to this issue. However, little is known about the best strategy for d...

Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) countries (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam) are likely to become one of the next hotspots for emission reduction, since CO2 emissions in this area will have a two-thirds increase by 2040 due to rapid economy growth and associated energy consumption. As one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change...

The Russia–Ukraine conflict has triggered an energy crisis that directly affected household energy costs for heating, cooling and mobility and indirectly pushed up the costs of other goods and services throughout global supply chains. Here we bridge a global multi-regional input–output database with detailed household-expenditure data to model the...

In our globalized economy, the consumption of goods and services induces economic benefits but also environmental pressures and impacts around the world. Consumption levels are especially high in the current 27 member countries of the European Union (EU), which are some of the wealthiest economies in the world. Here, we determine the global distrib...

Although China has developed the world’s largest carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS), there is no official documentation explaining how the current sectorial coverage plan was determined and what sectoral rollout plan is preferred. Here, we contribute to the policy development of the world’s largest carbon market by suggesting a priority list of...

Subnational and non-governmental actors are expected to provide important contributions to broader climate actions. A consistent and accurate quantification of their GHG emissions is an important prerequisite for the success of such efforts. However, emissions embodied in domestic and international supply chains, that can undermine the effectivenes...

The improvement of the habitat of protected areas is of great importance to meet the Convention on Biological Diversity. Using legal means to protect sensitive areas from human interference such as land use change has been an effective way to maintain ecosystem services. Currently 17% of global land is protected yet less effective in face of anthro...

Urban resilience refers to the resilience of a city after external shocks and its ability to prevent, respond and recover from extreme disasters. In 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs) made urban resilience one of the global sustainable development goals. Additional information regarding urban resilience can have a posi...

Self-reported life satisfaction of China's population has not improved as much as expected during the economic boom, which was accompanied by a significant decline in environmental performance. Is environmental pollution the culprit for the lagging subjective well-being? To explore this issue, this paper adopts the sentiment analysis method to cons...

Despite the increase in vehicle electrification in recent years, the transport sector is still a major contributor to the rise in global carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions. Using dynamic product lifecycle (LC) models, our study analyzes the relationship between lifecycle CO 2 (LC-CO 2 ) emissions and the proportion of electric vehicle sales in Japan....

A good understanding of household carbon emissions is an important part of forming climate mitigation strategies to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Numerous studies have been carried out on emissions from household consumption and the inequality between urban and rural areas in high-income developed countries, but there is a lack...

China is playing an increasing role in global climate change mitigation, and local authorities need more city-specific information on the emissions trends and patterns when designing low-carbon policies. This study provides the most comprehensive CO2 emission inventories of 287 Chinese cities from 2001 to 2019. The emission inventories are compiled...

Substantially enhancing carbon mitigation ambition is a crucial step towards achieving the Paris climate goal. Yet this attempt is hampered by poor knowledge on the potential cost and benefit of emission mitigation for each emitter. Here we use a global economic model to assess the mitigation costs for 27 major emitting countries and regions, and f...

Application of carbon trading on the consumption-side to subsidize NEVs (called “carbon trading subsidy (CTS)”) is expected to become the successor policy for the phasing-out purchase subsidy, but there is still a gap between practice and theory in how to apply. This study applies CTS to bus industry and addresses the interaction problem between pu...

Measurement(s) methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions from municipal wastewater treatment facilities Technology Type(s) computational modeling technique Factor Type(s) influent and effluent chemical oxygen demand (COD) mass • influent and effluent total nitrogen (TN) mass • removed COD • electricity consumption • emisison factors • was...

Hydrogen is gaining tremendous traction in China as the fuel of the future to support the country's carbon neutrality ambitions. The promising role of hydrogen for use as fuel is heavily reliant on platinum (Pt) and the interactions between hydrogen fuel industry and Pt supply constraints have been largely overlooked. In this research, we develop a...

The largest 6,529 international corporations are accountable for almost 30% of global CO2e emissions. A growing awareness of the role of the corporate world in the path toward sustainability has led many shareholders and stakeholders to pursue increasingly stringent and ambitious environmental goals. However, how to assess the corporate environment...

In order to deliver substantial reductions of U.S. residential emissions, cost-effective responses to climate change will need to recognize changes in consumer behavior and lifestyles as important mechanisms to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. Marketing experts have long recognized the usefulness of developing composite variables to target specific...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the U.S. peaked and declined in the first decade of the 21st century, largely attributed to the increased use of natural gas and renewable energy replacing coal. However, if and to what extent household consumption also played a role in this trend is still debated. Finding demand-side options is necessary to hedge...

Multi‐regional input–output (MRIO) models are widely used to analyze the economic interdependencies between regions in the context of global trade and environmental research. MRIO tables enable us to teleconnect the sectors in different regions along the supply chain and track both direct and indirect impacts of global production. Yet emerging econ...

It is increasingly common to use the Inclusive Wealth Index (IWI) to evaluate national sustainability; however, IWI's highly aggregated components and limited regional cases restrict its further application in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study extends the traditional three-component IWI framework into six disaggregated...

The coronavirus pandemic has severely impacted our day-to-day activities and brought about significant change in all major sectors, especially surface passenger transport. Lockdowns and stay-at-home restrictions have significantly reduced energy demand and consequently CO 2 emissions of surface passenger transport. The change in CO 2 emissions is c...

Wealth and income are disproportionately distributed among the global population. This has direct consequences on consumption patterns and consumption-based carbon footprints, resulting in carbon inequality. Due to persistent inequality, millions of people still live in poverty today. On the basis of global expenditure data, we compute country- and...

The recent EU Ship Recycling Regulation (EU SRR) and other existing conventions aimed to reduce harmful environmental and health impacts of ship shipbreaking, may push the shipbreaking industry further to South Asian countries, where ecosystem and public health are threatened due to the lack of monitoring for dirty beaching methods for ship breakin...

Unprecedented pace of urbanization and industrialization caused a massive increase in China’s urban metabolic pressure. The trend presents an urgent challenge for detailing the long-term changes and disparities in urban metabolic performances in a wide range of cities. Here, we present empirical evidence of 283 China’s cities from 2000 to 2018 base...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future. To achieve the goal, tracking progress — not just on a national level, but locally — is crucial to guide future policy development. While sustainability assessment at the national evel is quite advanced in China, similar assessments focusi...

Cities are at the front line of combating environmental pollution and climate change, thus support from cities is crucial for successful enforcement of environmental policy. To mitigate environmental problems, China introduced at provincial level the Environmental Protection Tax Law in 2018. Yet the resulting economic burden on households in differ...

Energy and emission data are crucial to climate change research and mitigation efforts. The accuracy of energy statistics is essential for mitigation strategies and evaluating the performance of low carbon energy transition efforts. This study provides the most up‐to‐date emission inventories for China and its provinces for 2018 and 2019. We also u...

The coronavirus pandemic has severely affected our daily lives, with direct consequences on passenger transport. This in turn has strongly impacted the energy demand of the transport sector and associated CO2 emissions. We analyse near real-time passenger mobility and related emission trends in Europe between 21 January and 21 September 2020. We co...

Decoupling economic growth from resource use and emissions is a precondition to stay within planetary boundaries. Some countries have achieved a reduction in their production-based emissions in the past decade. However, the decline in PBE has often been achieved via outsourcing of emissions to other countries, which may lead to higher emissions glo...

Recent studies have used high resolution imagery to estimate tree cover and changes in natural forest cover in Haiti. However, there is still no rigorous quantification of tree cover change accounting for planted or managed trees, which are very important in Haiti’s farming systems. We estimated net tree cover change, gross loss, and gross gain in...

Key targets of the sustainable development goals might be in contradiction to each other. For example, poverty alleviation may exacerbate air pollution by increasing production and associated emissions. This paper, for the first time, investigates the potential impacts of achieving different poverty eradication goals on typical air pollutants in Ch...

Key targets of the sustainable development goals might be in contradiction to each other. For example, poverty alleviation may exacerbate air pollution by increasing production and associated emissions. This paper, for the first time, investigates the potential impacts of achieving different poverty eradication goals on typical air pollutants in Ch...

Environmental implications of food choice are the focus of increasingly extensive research, but less is known about the impacts of dietary patterns of different socio-economic groups of a country, and the trade-offs between nutritional quality and environmental impacts of diet within those groups. We evaluate the impacts of US household dietary pat...

The effectiveness of different countermeasures to economic crisis from the public health emergency is still inadequately understood. We establish an illustrative scenario, specifying the shocks of COVID-19 pandemic and countermeasures applying a general equilibrium model to analyze the effectiveness of countermeasures with a particular focus on tra...

Household consumption carbon footprint and inequality reductions are vital for a sustainable society, especially for rural areas. This study, focusing on rural China, one of the fastest growing economies with a massive population, explored the carbon footprint and inequality of household consumption using the latest micro household survey data of 2...

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development pursues 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), the achievement of which may be influenced by a country’s role in global supply chains and position in international trade patterns. Global trade changes constantly with an increasing share of flows between developing countries. However, little is known abo...

Global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to five economic sectors: energy, industry, buildings, transport and AFOLU (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). In this topical review we synthesize the literature to explain recent trends in global and regional emissions in each of these sectors. To contextualise our review, we present estimate...

Land-use activities are increasingly globalized and industrialized. While this contributes to a reduction of pressure on domestic ecosystems in some regions, spillover effects from these processes represent potential obstacles for global sustainable land-use. This contribution scrutinizes the complex global resource nexus of national land-use inten...

Echo chambers in science describe the amplification and repetition of information within closed networks. Frequently used data sources can cause echo chambers as scientists keep reading similar outputs from different sources, creating false perceptions of certainty and variety of data sources. We show this effect by studying the scientific and grey...

Rapid urbanization has tremendously changed the global landscape with profound impacts on our society. Nighttime light (NTL) data can provide valuable information about human activities and socioeconomic conditions, thus has become an effective proxy to measure urban development. By using NTL-derived urban measures from 1992 to 2018, we analyzed th...

The global economy is facing a serious recession due to COVID-19, with implications for CO2 emissions. Here, using a global adaptive multiregional input–output model and scenarios of lockdown and fiscal counter measures, we show that global emissions from economic sectors will decrease by 3.9 to 5.6% in 5 years (2020 to 2024) compared with a no-pan...

Substantially enhancing carbon mitigation ambition is a crucial step towards achieving the Paris climate goal. Yet this attempt is hampered by poor knowledge on the net economic effect of mitigation for each emitter, by taking into account potential cost and benefit. Here we use a global economic model with regional and sectoral disaggregation deta...

Sustainable water management is one of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and is characterized by a high level of interdependencies with other SDGs from regional to global scales. Many water assessment studies are restricted to silo thinking, mostly focusing on water-related consequences, while lacking a quantification of trade-offs and syner...

Production and consumption activities deplete freshwater, generate water pollution and may further lead to water stress. The accurate measurement of water stress is a precondition for sustainable water management. This paper reviews the literature on physical water stress induced by blue and green water use and by water pollution. Specifically, we...

As national efforts to reduce CO2 emissions intensify, policy-makers need increasingly specific, subnational information about the sources of CO2 and the potential reductions and economic implications of different possible policies. This is particularly true in China, a large and economically diverse country that has rapidly industrialized and urba...