Page Kyle

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory | PNNL · Joint Global Change Research Institute

The concept of sustainability inherently spans multiple spatial scales, sectors, variables, and time horizons. This study links a recently developed method of assessing present‐day agricultural sustainability across environmental, economic, and social dimensions with a process‐based integrated assessment model, in order to allow forward‐looking ana...

Currently responsible for over one fifth of carbon emissions worldwide, the transportation sector will need to undergo a substantial technological transition to ensure compatibility with global climate goals. Few studies have modeled aggressive strategies to achieve zero emissions across all transportation modes, including aviation and shipping, al...

Incorporating the interdependencies between water, energy and food (WEF) within an integrated approach of planning and management could help nations worldwide to address sustainability concerns. This is a topic of great importance for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where water is a very limited resource. In this study, we develop a...

Ammonia has been proposed as a shipping fuel, yet potential adverse side-effects are poorly understood. We argue that if nitrogen releases from ammonia are not tightly controlled, the scale of the demands of maritime transport are such that the global nitrogen cycle could be substantially altered.

In the search for low-carbon energy carriers, there is renewed interest in hydrogen. However, it remains highly uncertain to what extent hydrogen may be deployed in a future energy system, and at what cost. We improve on the state-of-the-art integrated assessment model GCAM and run several scenarios in which the global energy system reaches carbon...

Transport accounts for 24% of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Governments face challenges in developing feasible and equitable mitigation strategies to reduce energy consumption and manage the transition to low-carbon transport systems. To meet the local and global transport emission reduction targets, policymakers need more realistic/sophi...

Estimates of biofuel carbon intensity are uncertain and depend on modeled land use change (LUC) emissions. While analysts have focused on economic and agronomic assumptions affecting the quantity of land converted, researchers have paid less attention to how models classify land into broad categories and designate some categories as ineligible for...

Estimating realistic potential yields by crop type and region is challenging; such yields depend on both biophysical characteristics (e.g., soil characteristics, climate, etc.), and the crop management practices available in any site or region (e.g., mechanization, irrigation, crop cultivars). A broad body of literature has assessed potential yield...

Earlier studies have noted potential adverse impacts of land-related emissions mitigation strategies on food security, particularly due to food price increases—but without distinguishing these strategies’ individual effects under different conditions. Using six global agroeconomic models, we show the extent to which three factors—non-CO2 emissions...

Researchers explore future economic and climate scenarios using global economic and integrated assessment models to understand long-term interactions between human development and global environmental changes. However, differences in trade modeling approaches are an important source of uncertainty in these types of assessments, particularly for reg...

The transport sector is a crucial bottleneck in the decarbonization challenge. To study the sector’s decarbonization potential in the wider systems perspective, we couple a large-scale integrated assessment model, Regionalized Model of INvestments and Development (REMIND), to a detailed transport model, Energy Demand Generator-Transport (EDGE-T). T...

Comprehensive study of the environmental impacts associated with demand for an energy resource or carrier in any one sector requires a full consideration of the direct and indirect impacts on the rest of the regional and global energy system. Biofuels are especially complex since they have feedbacks to both the energy system and to regional and glo...

Stabilizing climate change well below 2 °C and towards 1.5 °C requires comprehensive mitigation of all greenhouse gases (GHG), including both CO 2 and non-CO 2 GHG emissions. Here we incorporate the latest global non-CO 2 emissions and mitigation data into a state-of-the-art integrated assessment model GCAM and examine 90 mitigation scenarios pairi...

Energy system transformation scenarios satisfying particular climate stabilization objectives, such as 2°C, suggest that a wide range of fossil energy outcomes could be consistent with such objectives. The underlying drivers of variability in these outcomes cannot, however, be easily separated. This paper attempts to shed light on such drivers usin...

This study incorporates the energy demands of water abstraction, treatment, distribution, and post-use wastewater treatment into the Global Change Analysis Model, an integrated human-Earth systems model, and analyzes a range of scenarios that estimate the future evolution of this demand of energy. The study complements research on historical and fu...

This study investigated future bioenergy supply and demand from energy crops in China using the GCAM-integrated assessment model under different climate policy scenarios. The results indicated that China has rich resources of energy crops and marginal land for developing bioenergy. Under future carbon related policies, bioenergy production will con...

Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land-use (AFOLU) are thought to play a vital role in long-term GHG emissions reduction, especially for their importance in non-CO2 emissions, bioenergy supply and carbon sequestration realized by afforestation. Several studies have noted potential adverse impacts of land-related emissions mitigation on food security,...

This dataset and documentation contains detailed information of the iTEM Open Database, a harmonized transport data set of historical values, 1970 - 2018. It aims to create transparency through two key features: Open-Data: Assembling a comprehensive collection of publicly-available transportation data Open-Code: All code and documentation will be...

Despite broad consensus on the benefits of a nexus approach to multi-sector planning, actual implementation in government and other decision-making institutions is still rare. This study presents an approach to conducting integrated energy-water-land (EWL) planning, using Uruguay as an example. This stakeholder-driven study focuses on assessing the...

Agricultural crop yields are susceptible to changes in future temperature, precipitation, and other Earth system factors. Future changes to these physical Earth system attributes and their effects on agricultural crop yields are highly uncertain. United States agricultural producers will be affected by such changes whether they occur domestically o...

Historical increases in agricultural production were achieved predominantly by large increases in agricultural productivity. Intensification of crop and livestock production also plays a key role in future projections of agricultural land use. Here, we assess and discuss projections of crop yields by global agricultural land-use and integrated asse...

Projections of building electricity consumption are used in multiple fields and for a variety of purposes, from energy utility investment decisions to global climate assessments. Existing approaches to modeling building electricity consumption span a range of structural methodologies, spatial resolutions, and temporal scales, potentially leading to...

Future changes in climate and socioeconomic systems will drive both the availability and use of water resources, leading to evolutions in scarcity. The contributions of both systems can be quantified individually to understand the impacts around the world, but also combined to explore how the coevolution of energy-water-land systems affects not onl...

Land use is at the core of various sustainable development goals. Long-term climate foresight studies have structured their recent analyses around five socio-economic pathways (SSPs), with consistent storylines of future macroeconomic and societal developments; however, model quantification of these scenarios shows substantial heterogeneity in land...

Socioeconomics assumptions for the scenarios developed in this study. (PDF)

Assumptions about emissions constraints in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region in the NDC Policy Scenarios. (DOCX)

GCAM representation of the 7 Latin American regions. (PDF)

GCAM outputs for the Reference (no policy) scenario: Total water withdrawals (Billion m3) by region (top) and by source (bottom). (PDF)

GCAM outputs for the Reference (no policy) scenario: Primary energy consumption (EJ) by region (top) and by source (bottom). (PDF)

w GCAM outputs for the Reference (no policy) scenario: Primary energy consumption (EJ) by region (top) and by source (bottom). (PDF)

GCAM outputs for the Reference (no policy) scenario: Greenhouse gas emissions (MtCO2e; excluding CO2 LUC emissions) by region (top) and by source (bottom). (PDF)

Regional Net GHG emissions (MtCO2e): Reference Scenario. (DOCX)

Regional Net GHG emissions (MtCO2e): NDC_NOCCS Scenario. (DOCX)

Main results from the ancillary NDC Policy Scenarios: Long-Term limited nuclear energy capacity in Latin America. (DOCX)

Many of the world's major freshwater aquifers are being exploited unsustainably, with some projected to approach environmentally unsafe drawdown limits within the 21st century. Given that aquifer depletion tends to occur in important crop producing regions, the prospect of running dry poses a significant threat to global food security. Here we use...

The increasing data requirements of complex models demand robust, reproducible, and transparent systems to track and prepare models’ inputs. Here we describe version 1.0 of the gcamdata R package that processes raw inputs to produce the hundreds of XML files needed by the GCAM integrated human-earth systems model. It features extensive functional a...

Plain Language Summary In many regions of the world, groundwater reserves are being depleted rapidly. This raises concerns for the sustainability of irrigated agriculture and global food supplies. It is therefore important to study groundwater depletion and possible exhaustion of water resources at the global scale. A problem for such analysis is t...

This paper describes GCAM v5.1, an open source model that represents the linkages between energy, water, land, climate, and economic systems. GCAM is a market equilibrium model, is global in scope, and operates from 1990 to 2100 in 5-year time steps. It can be used to examine, for example, how changes in population, income, or technology cost might...

This paper describes GCAM v5.1, an open source model that represents the linkages between energy, water, land, climate, and economic systems. GCAM is a market equilibrium model, is global in scope, and operates from 1990 to 2100 in five-year time steps. It can be used to examine, for example, how changes in population, income, or technology cost mi...

This paper explores regional response strategies to potential water scarcity. Using a model of integrated human-earth system dynamics (GCAM), we test a wide range of alternate water demand scenarios to explore regional response strategies. We create a typology that categorizes countries and basins according to their responses in electricity and agr...

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) were developed without explicit assumptions for the future of the water sector; therefore, projections of future water demands based on the SSPs often lack a treatment of water technology assumptions that is consistent with the SSP storylines. This study has developed a set of qualitative and quantitative as...

Food insecurity can be directly exacerbated by climate change due to crop-production-related impacts of warmer and drier conditions that are expected in important agricultural regions. However, efforts to mitigate climate change through comprehensive, economy-wide GHG emissions reductions may also negatively affect food security, due to indirect im...

This paper focuses on comparing the framework and projections of energy consumption and emissions from India's transportation sector up to 2050. To understand the role of road transport in energy demand and emissions, five modeling teams developed baseline projections for India's transportation sector as part of inter-model comparison exercise unde...

p>In the version of this Article previously published, technical problems led to the wrong summary appearing on the homepage, and an incorrect Supplementary Information file being uploaded. Both errors have now been corrected.</p

The Nationally Determined Contributions are allowing countries to examine options for reducing emissions through a range of domestic policies. India, like many developing countries, has committed to reducing emissions through specific policies, including building energy codes. Here we assess the potential of these sectoral policies to help in achie...

This paper explores potential future implications of climate change on building energy expenditures around the globe. Increasing expenditures result from increased electricity use for cooling, and are offset to varying degrees, depending on the region, by decreased energy consumption for heating. The analysis is conducted using a model of the globa...

The Paris Agreement requires countries to articulate near-term emissions reduction strategies through to 2025 or 2030 by communicating nationally determined contributions (NDCs), as well as encouraging the formulation of long-term low-emission development strategies (Article 4.19)¹. In response, many countries have either submitted or are preparing...

India is expected to add 40 billion m² of new buildings till 2050. Buildings are responsible for one third of India's total energy consumption today and building energy use is expected to continue growing driven by rapid income and population growth. The implementation of the Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) is one of the measures to improv...

Future scenarios and assessment studies used to prepare for long-term energy transitions and develop robust strategies to address climate change are highly dependent on the assessment of technology characteristics and availability. The electric power sector in the United States recently experienced a significant cost escalation: e.g., construction...

Although the aviation sector is a relatively small contributor to total greenhouse gas emissions, it is a fast-growing, fossil fuel-intensive transportation mode. Because aviation is a mode for which liquid fuels currently have no practical substitute, biofuels are gaining attention as a promising cleaner alternative. In this paper, we use the GCAM...

The freight sector's role is examined using the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) for a range of climate change mitigation scenarios and future freight demand assumptions. Energy usage and CO2 emissions from freight have historically grown with a correlation to GDP, and there is limited evidence of near-term global decoupling of freight demand...

We report results of a “hindcast” experiment focusing on the agricultural and land-use component of the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM). We initialize GCAM to reproduce observed agriculture and land use in 1990 and forecast agriculture and land use patterns on one-year time steps to 2010. We report overall model performance for nine crops in...

The industry sector is a major energy consumer and GHG emitter. Effective climate change mitigation strategies will require a significant reduction of industrial emissions. To better understand the variations in the projected industrial pathways for both baseline and mitigation scenarios, we compare key input and structure assumptions used in energ...

Figure S1. Aggregated world regions as applied in the regional analysis. Figure S2. Schematic overview of the analysis conducted in this study. Figure S3. Variation of land use changes for 43 scenarios of 11 models. Figure S4. Projections of land cover areas [Mha] for cropland, pasture and forest. Figure S5. Full results of the variance decompo...

Understanding potential impacts of climate change is complicated by spatially mismatched land representations between gridded datasets and models, and land use models with larger regions defined by geopolitical and/or biophysical criteria. Here we quantify the sensitivity of Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) outputs to the delineation of Agro-E...

This paper focuses on comparing the frameworks and projections from four global transportation models with considerable technology details. We analyze and compare the modeling frameworks, underlying data, assumptions, intermediate parameters, and projections to identify the sources of divergence or consistency, as well as key knowledge gaps. We fin...

In the future, the land system will be facing new intersecting challenges. While food demand, especially for resource-intensive livestock based commodities, is expected to increase, the terrestrial system has large potentials for climate change mitigation through improved agricultural management, providing biomass for bioenergy, and conserving or e...

This research assesses climate, technological, and policy impacts on consumptive water use from electricity generation in the Southwest over a planning horizon of nearly a century. We employed an integrated modeling framework taking into account feedbacks between climate change, air temperature and humidity, and consequent power plant water require...

This paper compares projections over the twenty-first century of SO2, BC, and OC emissions from three technologically detailed, long-term integrated assessment models. The character of the projections and the response of emissions due to a comprehensive climate policy are discussed focusing on the sectoral level. In a continuation of historical exp...

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is considered a potential source of net negative carbon emissions and, if deployed at sufficient scale, could help reduce carbon dioxide emissions and concentrations. However, the viability and economic consequences of large-scale BECCS deployment are not fully understood. We use the Global Change A...