Sampedro_etal_ERL

Enhancing energy and food access through reduction of income inequality does not jeopardize the achievement of existing climate pledges

Jon Sampedro^1,2*, Dirk-Jan Van de Ven¹, Russell Horowitz¹, Clàudia Rodés-Bachs¹, Iñaki Arto¹, Maria Victoria Román¹, Manuel Tomás¹, Kanishka Narayan³, Pralit Patel³,

¹ Basque Center for Climate Change, Leioa, Spain

² IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Plaza Euskadi 5, 48009 Bilbao, Spain

³ Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, College Park, United States of America

* corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract

Reducing within-region income inequality is a global priority that must be urgently addressed to promote human development and enhance global access to energy and food. This could lead to higher energy-related emissions by lower-income consumers, potentially creating some conflicts with climate change mitigation objectives. Using an enhanced version of the Global Change Analysis Model, we simulate reductions of within-region income inequality that allow for narrowing differences in energy and food demand across deciles by 2050 in a Paris-compliant world. The energy demand increase by lower-income consumers is greater than the decline in demand by wealthier and more satiated income groups, leading to an overall rise in total demand. Nevertheless, the projected higher energy demand in the proposed more egalitarian societies only slightly increases the regional carbon prices and mitigation costs associated with the emission targets, therefore posing minimal impact on the achievement of the existing portfolio of climate pledges.

Code reference

The GCAM_GRAPHICS model used in this study is available at Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/16960260

jonsampedro. (2025). GCAM-GRAPHICS-7.0.0 (GCAM-GRAPHICS-v7.0.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16960260

Contributing modeling software

Model	Version	Repository Link
Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM)	GCAM_GRAPHICS	https://github.com/jonsampedro/gcam-core

Component	Version	Repository Link
gcamdata	1.0	https://github.com/JGCRI/gcamdata
rgcam	1.2.0	https://github.com/JGCRI/rgcam
pridr	0.1.0	https://github.com/JGCRI/pridr
rmap	1.0.0	https://github.com/JGCRI/rmap

Reproduce the experiment

To reproduce the results and figures shown in Sampedro et al.,

1. Install R here - https://www.r-project.org/
2. Install R studio from here - https://www.rstudio.com/
3. Run the script called process_results_inequality.R chunk by chunk to generate the figures.

Acknowledgments

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon research program under grant agreement 101060679 (GRAPHICS project).