Róbin Smaal about the impact of climate initiatives on human development and emissions
About
This is the first study that explores the impact of directly targeted mitigation climate initiatives on both greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and human development in Africa from 1990 to 2019. This research emphasizes the urgency of addressing anthropogenic climate change and the disproportionate burden it places on vulnerable communities, while also establishing the need for a better understanding of the relationship between climate initiatives and human development, underlying the examination of the individual impacts on education, health, and income levels.
Dataset
The study adopts an advanced quasi-experimental research design, exploiting both the timing of the climate initiatives and their effects on countries based on their level of participation. With this, it compares changes in emissions and human development between treated countries and control countries over time, using panel data with a time span from 1990 to 2019. The dataset is created in collaboration with the Global Data Lab dataset on Human Development, Climate Cooperative Initiatives Database (C-CID) containing prominent mitigation initiatives, the World Bank presenting data on GHG emissions and its three prominent contributors, and NASA MERRA-5 analysis featuring data on temperature and precipitation levels.
Mean GHG emissions between 1990–1994 and 2015–2019
Figure 1 below shows the average difference in total emissions —in megatons CO2 equivalents— between the first and last five years of the sample by country, acknowledging that almost all countries experienced an increase in their GHG emissions.
Mean HDI between 2000–2004* and 2015–2019
The average differences in HDI between 2000–2004 and 2015–2019 are visualized in Figure 2 below. Despite an increase of over 25% between the early 1990s and after the 2015s, resulting in an average HDI of 54.8, it is still considerably lower than the average HDI in Europe, which is 75.2 between 1990 and 2019.
Further research
The study found that several data points on the human development index were missing. As a result, the years before 2000 were omitted. This allows for future research, by extending the methodology to apply a synthetic control method, where weights are given to the control group to minimize differences in pre-trends before implementation of the initiative(s) per country.
Notes
(*) Because of missing datapoints, the averages of the human development on the left-hand side are for most countries measured between 2000 – 2004. The countries Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, and South Sudan, the mean is calculated of the first four years of observation (2005 – 2009, 2006 – 2010, 2010 – 2014, respectively).