A data-analysis study on the links between the CO2 intensity of energy and human development

Contest: The energy use has allowed humankind to reach a high level of wellbeing. But this energy employment, by means of the actual technology, is producing a huge environmental impact, with serious consequences whether for humans or natural environmental. The thesis aims to study, through data analysis, a possible global coexistence between happy people and healthy planet. Thesis structure: In the first part of the thesis, the state of the art is defined, in which the main subjects of the study, namely the human wellbeing, the energy and the environment, and some of their indicators are introduced. Furthermore, in this first part, particular attention is paid to the review of article that have analysed the links between energy and wellbeing from a statistical point of view. From this part, it has been decided to analyse one indicator for each subject of the study, in order to accomplish the thesis goal. Therefore, the second part is dedicated to a statistical analysis of three indicators, one of wellbeing, one of energy use and one of environment, chosen because their correlation has not yet been studied by literature in detail. Indicators and methods of analysis: In order to study the three subjects simultaneously, the statistical analysis is focused on the correlation between Human Development Index (HDI) and CO2 intensity (CO2int), which is the combination of the CO2 emission and of the Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES). The analysis is carried out in cross sectional analysis (data of 2014) and in longitudinal analysis (data from 1990 to 2014), by focusing on 96 countries belonging to any development level. Main results: The results show a pure correlation between CO2int and HDI both in cross sectional and in longitudinal analysis. In fact, with data of 2014, there is a bell distribution of CO2int as a function of HDI, in other words, countries with a HDI around 0.7 have a bigger CO2int. The time analysis of this correlation show that the evolution over time of CO2int of a country depends on the HDI level of the country itself. Indeed, from 1990 to 2014, the countries with low and medium HDI have increased their CO2int, while the countries with high HDI have shown a ill-defined behaviour, and the countries with very high HDI have decreased their CO2int. Conclusions: The results offer an important information to build models and future scenarios. With this information, two scenarios are build and their CO2 accumulated from 2000 to 2050 are computed in order to compare them with the CO2 budget of 1000 Gt, which is considered the limit of CO2 accumulated in order to maintain the global warming below the 2°C. The scenario defined “business as usual” shows a CO2 accumulated from 2000 to 2050 of almost 2500 Gt. The scenario defined “ideal” requires from 2021 a limit on TPES per capita of 2.41 Toe/pers and that all countries utilize an energy technology with a CO2int of 0.9 kg/kgoe (value of Sweden on 2014). The ideal scenario show a CO2 accumulated of 1120.93 Gt, which corresponds to a discrete probability to maintain the global warming below the 2°C.