Annual Review 2024

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. 

AJARE; Last year, I took on the editor-in-chief role at AJARE together with Yu Sheng and Johannes Sauer. This was the first full year that we were editors. We have produced four regular issues of the journal and launched calls for papers for four special issues. Three of these are public calls for papers. The aim of the calls for papers is to get quality contributions to the journal and signal that we would like more submissions on environmental and resource economics. In February, we held a "Meet the Editors" session at the AARES - AJARE's parent society - conference. We have also completed a new contract between AARES and Wiley that includes shifting the journal to online only publication from next year. I am the lead editor, and my role includes liaising with AARES as part of the AARES board and proof-reading articles before they are published. It turns out that the latter takes quite a lot of time to get right.

Bangkok

Conferences and Travel: The AARES Conference was in Canberra this year and so I didn't need to travel to attend it. I presented my paper co-authored with Suryadeepto Nag on electrification impacts in India. In June, I travelled to Sydney to give a seminar at UNSW and went back in August to present at a climate economics workshop hosted by UNSW in the CBD. In November, I was part of a panel at Crawford's annual China Update Conference talking about changes in Chinese carbon emissions.

At the beginning of the year we went on vacation in Sydney. My brother and his wife were meant to join us, but due to the war in Israel, where they live, they decided to stay home. In July we went on vacation in Maroochydore, Queensland. I've very rarely, if ever, flown somewhere just to go on vacation. Usually, I am going to conferences, traveling to work with people, or visiting friends and relatives. In almost all cases I can think of where we flew somewhere for leisure purposes alone, we added an extra segment to a big multi-purpose trip. So this could be just the second time I have taken a flight just to go on vacation. At the end of the year, I went on a trip to China to visit my wife's relatives and then to Thailand to relax. It was my first trip out of Australia since before the pandemic. I last traveled abroad to the IAEE conference in New Zealand in February 2024. Of course, my second child was born in 2019 and so that also reduced our desire to travel. Now he's five, he is easier to travel with. So, we added a leg to Thailand and back from Guangzhou just to go on vacation. Is this a new non-environmentally friendly trend for me? On the other hand, originally I planned to fly on Thai Airways to Beijing via Bangkok, but the travel agent put us on China Southern, which added two flight segments. 

Townhouses in Thailand

Teaching: This was the third year that I taught IDEC8018 Agricultural and Resource Economics. I taught it together with IDEC8053 Environmental Economics in Semester 2 for the second year running. I again taught lectures in hybrid mode – an in-person lecture live-streamed on Zoom. I disagree with our departmental policy to continue to have online students. Less than 10% of our students are online only. This then requires us to tailor lectures, tutorials, and exams to serve the online audience, which seems to be a case of the tail wagging the dog, in my opinion. If we made an effort to recruit larger numbers of online students, it could make sense. I am thinking of dropping live lectures next year, as there is little interaction with either the in-class or online audience anymore, which is not the case for tutorials. Instead, I would likely have recorded lectures and double the tutorial time.

Research and Publications: It was an even slower year for research. At the beginning of the year I was working on an ARC Discovery Project proposal with researchers at UNSW but we pulled the plug on it and did not submit. I did some work on a paper on the economic impact of climate change, which I presented twice as mentioned above. This paper was an outgrowth of the ARC proposal. I also started working with my PhD students MiLim Kim and Banna Banik and a group of researchers in Germany including Stephan Bruns and Jan Minx on meta-analysis of the impact of carbon-pricing policies. Banna works at the Central Bank of Bangladesh and started the PhD this year.

I published only one journal article with a 2024 publication date:

Timilsina G., D. I. Stern, and D. K. Das (2024) Physical infrastructure and economic growth, Applied Economics,

and I published no new working papers. But I do have two papers under review and one we need to revise and resubmit for the second time.

Google Scholar citations reached roughly 27,750 with an h-index of 64.

Outreach and Service: I again wrote fewer blogposts this year. Three in total compared to five in 2023! Twitter followers rose to 1909 from 1850 the previous year. People keep talking about the demise of academic Twitter. Maybe there are fewer academic economics tweets than before, but it's unclear if there is one single other place where people are congregating. I find Twitter very useful for news and don't want to spend time trawling various platforms looking for content. But the slowdown in new followers suggests that things are changing.

I reviewed 5 journal articles, one tenure/promotion case, and one grant proposal. I am taking on far fewer reviews than I used to because of my role as AJARE editor.

I self-nominated for the IPCC AR7 scoping meeting but wasn't selected. The IPCC held an online meeting for the majority of nominees who weren't selected, which allowed us to provide some input.

Chinese Carbon Emissions in 2023 vs. 2024

A couple of days ago I posted an update to my 2023 article on the trend in carbon emissions in China after the pandemic. That blogpost compares emissions for the whole of 2023 to those for the whole of 2019. But what happened in 2024? So far we have nine months of data, which we can compare to the first nine months of 2023.

According to Carbon Monitor, emissions have fallen by 0.6% in 2024 compared to 2023. Emissions from power generation rose by 1.6% with smaller increases in transport (0.7%) and residential (0.8%) emissions offset by a 4% fall in industrial emissions. Does this mean that Chinese emissions are peaking?

Electricity output increased by 6.3% between 2023 and 2024 so far. The increase was supplied by roughly equal increases in thermal power, hydropower, and the new renewables. The increase in hydropower is weather-related and otherwise there would have been a more significant increase in thermal power.

Coal production is only up 0.7% on last year. In the first few months of the year, coal production was lower than in the previous year but by October it was running at 6% above the level of last year.

In conclusion, the fall in emissions so far this year is probably partly due to the increase in hydroelectric output and the slow economy early in the year. This probably doesn't yet constitute a sustainable peak in emissions.

China’s Carbon Emissions Trend after the Pandemic: An Update

Last year, I published an article in The Conversation followed by a paper in Environmental Challenges with Khalid Ahmed on the trend in carbon emissions in China after the pandemic. We concluded that emissions continued to rise strongly after the pandemic. Most of the increase was in the electric power sector. A peak in emissions wasn't yet in sight. Has anything changed in the past year? 

In the published paper, we compared emissions in the first eight months of 2019 - the last year before the pandemic - with the first eight months of 2023 - the first year after the pandemic. Now we can compare data for 2019 as a whole with 2023 as whole:

The differences between 2019 and 2023 for the power sector and total emissions are a little less dramatic than those in the published paper. Emissions in the power sector increased by 18% (21% using just the first 8 months) and total emissions increased by 8% from 2019 to 2023 (10% in the published paper). The data is from Carbon Monitor. Both of these differences are extremely statistically significant. Transport emissions fell by 1% (p = 0.01). The change in residential and industry emissions between the two years are not statistically significant. The published results showed a small but statistically significant increase in industrial emissions and no statistically significant change in transport or residential emissions.

We also presented the contributions of fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewable energy to electricity generation. Here is the graph updated for all twelve months of 2019 and 2023:

The shares of solar and wind increased from 1.6 and 5.0% in 2019 to 3.2% and 9.0% in 2023 but thermal electricity generation increased by 91 TWh p.a. compared to an increased of 51 TWh from the new renewables. Nuclear and hydropower increased by a total of 6 TWh. So, though output of electricity from new renewables increased a lot, thermal power still dominated the increase in electricity generation. The share of thermal power in total generation only fell from 72.2% to 70.1%. Finally, I've updated the coal production data to the end of 2023 (exponential trend fitted):

Coal production for 2023 was 26% higher than coal production in 2019 or a compound annual growth rate of 6%.

None of these results are much different than those in our published paper. But what about 2024? That will be the subject of my next post.