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Implications of Australia's population policy for future greenhouse gas emissions targets

Citation

Bradshaw, CJA and Brook, BW, Implications of Australia's population policy for future greenhouse gas emissions targets, Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, 3, (2) pp. 249-265. ISSN 2050-2680 (2016) [Refereed Article]


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Copyright Statement

© 2016 The Authors. Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

DOI: doi:10.1002/app5.135

Abstract

Australia's high per capita emissions rates makes it is a major emitter of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, but its low intrinsic growth rate means that future increases in population size will be dictated by net overseas immigration. We constructed matrix models and projected the population to 2100 under six different immigration scenarios. A constant 1 per cent proportional immigration scenario would result in 53 million people by 2100, producing 30.7 Gt CO2-e over that interval. Zero net immigration would achieve approximate population stability by mid-century and produce 24.1 Gt CO2-e. Achieving a 27 per cent reduction in annual emissions by 2030 would require a 1.5- to 2.0-fold reduction in per-capita emissions; an 80 per cent reduction by 2050 would require a 5.8- to 10.2-fold reduction. Australia's capacity to limit its future emissions will therefore depend primarily on a massive technological transformation of its energy sector, but business-as-usual immigration rates will make achieving meaningful mid-century targets more difficult.

Item Details

Item Type:Refereed Article
Research Division:Human Society
Research Group:Human geography
Research Field:Population geography
Objective Division:Environmental Policy, Climate Change and Natural Hazards
Objective Group:Understanding climate change
Objective Field:Climate change models
UTAS Author:Brook, BW (Professor Barry Brook)
ID Code:151395
Year Published:2016
Web of Science® Times Cited:4
Deposited By:Plant Science
Deposited On:2022-07-28
Last Modified:2022-08-09
Downloads:5 View Download Statistics

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