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

• Author / Creator

  Boyce, Scott Samuel David

• The drastic and immediate reduction of global greenhouse gases (GHG) is vital if humanity is to avoid the moderate to severe effects of a changing climate. To successfully lower these emissions, it is necessary 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. Quantifying the drivers of emission variation across these subnational jurisdictions is a necessity in developing effective future emission reduction policies. This thesis contributes insights into the much needed and growing body of subnational emission policy integration research by presenting several studies that quantify the effects of political governance, socioeconomics, and weather drivers on GHG emissions 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. My regression models explained 75.3% to 98.8% of the variation in GHG emissions across the ten Canadian provinces. Socioeconomics was correlated with most of the emission variation (46.1%), then weather (1.4%). Political governance followed lastly (0.7%) but had a strong interaction with socioeconomic factors. Of all factors tested, energy use efficiency affected GHGs the most, being associated with lower emissions in eight provinces. I conclude that socioeconomic factors are the strongest drivers of provincial GHG emissions, while political governance alone has a limited ability to compel changes in emission variation if the regional economy is not considered. Furthermore, investment in the dispersion of energy efficient technologies should have the highest return in reducing emissions.
  I then explored how the drivers of emissions change across vertical subnational jurisdictions, from the city to the provincial jurisdictions, by modelling the effects of political governance, household socioeconomics, and weather drivers on household GHG emissions from electricity, natural gas, and petrol for Canadian province and city jurisdictions from 1997-2009. My regression models explained 60.6% to 98.3% of GHG variation for cities and 71.1% to 99.3% for provinces. Variation partitioning showed that emission variation attributed to household socioeconomics, the most selected variable category, varied from 15.6% to 49.0% for cities and 66.6% to 75.2% for provinces. Political governance was associated with at most 4.8% of emission variation and was only significant for city jurisdictions. However, it did have joint contributions with other variable categories, especially socioeconomics (47.6% for electricity from non-fossil fuels). I conclude that it is crucial to integrate locally based, energy source specific policies into larger subnational and national based strategies to limit household emissions.
  In the last data chapter, I use quantile regression to quantify the nuanced effects of demographic, socioeconomic, and household factors on consumption-based community CO2 emissions for 1679 communities across Canada in 2015. The findings show that population then affluence were the most significant variables affecting total community emission variation, whereas affluence affected per capita community emission most of all factors. However, the effects of these factors on emissions were not uniform across quantiles. The effect sizes decreased for population and increased for affluence from lower to higher community emission quantiles. Additionally, poverty was correlated with higher emissions for all quantiles across Canada. I conclude that effective emission reduction policies must be based on the characteristics of individual communities, especially considering the variation in population and affluence across communities. Furthermore, poverty alleviation may effectively lower CO2 emissions and should be considered in future climate mitigation and adaptation policies.
  Overall, the findings of my thesis provide insights that are useful for the development of future emission reduction policies by quantifying the effects of political governance, socioeconomic, and weather factors on GHG variation. This thesis also explores how the drivers of emissions change across vertical and horizontal subnational jurisdictions, a much-needed contribution to better integrate subnational emission reduction actions with national and international climate change strategies.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Politics
  • Greenhouse gas emissions
  • Socioeconomics
  • Political economy
  • Climate change
  • Subnational
  • Provincial
  • Community

• Graduation date

  Spring 2023

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-h9v2-0k48

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.