The effect of education on future energy demand and carbon emissions

Changes in the demographic and socio-economic compositions of populations are relevant to the climate change issue because these characteristics can be important determinants both of the capacity to adapt to climate change impacts as well as of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. However, the incorporation of major trends such as aging, urbanization, and changes in household size into projections of future energy use and emissions is rare. Here we build on our previous work in this area by exploring the implications of future changes in educational attainment for emissions from energy use. On the one hand, improvements in education can be expected to lead to faster fertility decline and slower population growth which, all else equal, would be expected to reduce emissions. On the other hand, education can also be expected to lead to faster economic growth, which would tend to increase emissions, and also to changes in consumption patterns. The net effect of education on future emissions is therefore ambiguous. We employ a multi-region, multi-sector computable general equilibrium model of the world economy, driven with a new set of country-specific projections of future educational composition, to test the net effect of education on energy use and emissions on four world regions: China, India, Latin America, and Rest of Asia + Middle East. We find that a scenario with a faster education transition, relative to a baseline scenario, leads to a net increase in emissions in these regions of about 10%. This net effect is a result of an increase in per capita emissions of 13-14% and an only partly compensating decline in population size of 2-5% in 2050. The emissions effect is driven primarily by increases in labor productivity and economic growth due to education; changes in consumption preferences play a relatively minor role. Background Explicit analysis of the effect of demographic change on future emissions has been limited. Early exploratory analyses considered only population size or total numbers of households (Bongaarts, 1992; Mackellar et al., 1995) and used simple multiplicative models that did not account for important relationships between population and economic and technological factors. Meanwhile, a large emissions scenario literature (Nakicenovic et al., 2001) has developed that informs a wide range of climate change analysis and related policy discussions. Scenarios