Scott Boyce | ALES Graduate Seminar

Event details: A graduate exam seminar is a presentation of the student’s final research project for their degree.
This is an ALES MSc Final Exam Seminar by Scott Boyce. This seminar is open to the general public to attend.

PhD with Dr. Fangliang He

Thesis Topic: Political Governance, Socioeconomics, and Weather Influence Greenhouse Gas Emissions across Subnational Jurisdictions in Canada

Abstract:

The drastic and immediate reduction of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is vital if humanity is to avoid the moderate to severe effects of a changing climate. To successfully reduce these emissions, it is crucial to integrate and harmonize GHG reduction policies across horizontal and vertical political jurisdictions. There has been much worthwhile research conducted across national and international jurisdictions, but uncertainty about integrating emission reduction policies across subnational jurisdictions persists. My research contributes insights about this uncertainty by untangling the political governance, socioeconomic, and weather factors that drive emission variation across subnational jurisdictions in Canada. I begin by quantifying the effects of political governance, socioeconomics, and weather on provincial per-capita GHG emissions across Canada from 1990 to 2019. I then explore how the drivers of emissions change across vertical subnational jurisdictions by modelling the effects of political governance, household socioeconomics, and weather factors on household GHG emissions from electricity, natural gas, and petrol for Canadian province and city jurisdictions from 1997 to 2009. I finalize my thesis research by using quantile regression to investigate the effects of demographic, socioeconomic, and household factors on different quantiles of community consumption-based CO₂ emissions for 1679 communities across Canada and each province in 2015, respectively. Overall, my thesis provides important insights about how the drivers of GHG emissions change across vertical and horizontal subnational jurisdictions, a much-needed contribution to climate change research that will help to better integrate subnational emission reduction actions with national and international climate change strategies.