Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems (Mar 2019)
Accomplishing the Sustainable Development Goal 13 – Climate Action and the Role of the European Union
Abstract
One of the key aspects of Sustainable Development Goals is the difference in awareness of various societies regarding the need to protect the environment and transform economies and societies, so they rely more on renewable energy sources. As an initiative, it should represent a commitment that should be in focus of the international agreements, especially the Paris Climate Treaty. Whilst the Sustainable Development Goals as a totality comprise serious implementation limits, the Paris Climate Treaty should be considered necessary to implement the Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action. Implementing the Sustainable Development Goals would perhaps allow a holistic framework in combating climate change. Nevertheless, for the immediate future, there should be no delays in implementing a certain form of international effort to combat climate change. Therefore, the role of the European Union’s climate policy was studied in this article, mainly its effectiveness in the reduction of emissions, as a crucial aspect of implementing one of the crucial Sustainable Development Goals, Goal 13, especially in the context of the Paris Climate Treaty and carbon taxes. The EU sees its vital interest in the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goal 13, and in successful action that would enable it to comply with the Paris Climate Treaty. The quantitative analysis in this article, based on an Autoregressive Distributed Lags approach, finds that the most effective way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union would be to continue the shift towards more dependency on renewable sources of energy sources while maintaining current or slightly higher levels of taxation on energy consumption. The revenue should be directed towards subsidizing research and development of renewable energy sources.
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