| Summary: | 博士 === 國立中興大學 === 應用經濟學系所 === 97 === In recent years there has been growing concern over the issue of global climate change is dominated by human influences. Since 1800 various human activities have resulted in the emission of great volumes of gaseous materials into the atmosphere, which gradually increases earth’s average temperature. These notable gaseous include carbon dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which absorb the earth''s radiation and destroy the function of climatic modulation, leading potentially to a warming of the earth''s surface, which in turn could alter the earth''s climate. The emitted carbon dioxide account for 60~70% among the involved gaseous emission, which has become a serious problem due to it has the longest life in the atmosphere, thus accumulating over time. From the point of view of nature, the earth would produce a lot of greenhouse gas by itself, and meanwhile the ocean and forests can modulate greenhouse gas by itself, making the operation of earth balance. During recent years, human activities have made the nature mechanism out of control, the regionally climatic variation and large-scale climate change all followed the failure mechanism of nature.
Obviously, plants and animals in the natural environment of the world is dominated climate change. In addition, agricultural activities, water supplies, heating, hurricane and drought also deeply affected by climate change. Several key potential economic impacts have been identified. The impact of climate change on agricultural activities may be thought as the most important issue due to the agricultural products are the main living food for people. If the climate change occurs, the uncertainty for provision of world food will go up, and further makes the crisis of safe food appear all over the world. Recently, climate change has been linked to water resource due to water resource also affect the production process of agriculture. Climate change will affect water availability- quantity, quality, timing, and distribution. It will affect people who rely on water for everyday us.
Taiwan is located in the subtropical zone surrounded by the ocean, facilitating Taiwan to receive the impacts of climate change. From the point of view of the precipitation, the climate change has a big influence on the distribution of precipitation form the north region to the southern region in Taiwan. The increasing tendency of uneven precipitation would lead the higher probability for the shortage of water supply in the drought season. This not only influences the agricultural water, but also influences the allocation of the whole social water resource. This influences, moreover, the whole social welfare and the economic development would be held back by lacking water in the industrial sector. From the point of view of the ecological resources, climate change has influenced coral reefs by different ways and the most general phenomenon is that the greenhouse effects cause the sea surface temperature to rise warmly, which makes coral reefs can not survive after large-scale sea surface temperature warmed up. In 1998, unprecedented worldwide coral bleaching coincided with some of the warmest sea surface temperature on record. This year experienced the strongest El Niño since the ENSO has been investigated. Coral bleaching was reported in at least 60 countries and states in the Pacific Ocean, Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Arabian Gulf, and the Caribbean. Only the central Pacific seemed to have been unaffected (Beaser, 2000).
From the above-mentioned, it shows the issue related climate change has becoming more and more important investigation, inducing us to do some investigation about this issue. There are three essays in this thesis. First, the volatility of ENSO will be discussed by using time series model, and the structural point used to distinguish weather the variation of volatility of ENSO changed. Second, we will discuss the impact of climate change on coral reefs of the world. Finally, we will examine the influence of climate change on the transfer water price in the southern Taiwan.
During the two decades, the ENSO phenomenon has a weighty tendency with strong intensity and frequency. Some researches indicate and point out that the intensity of 1982-1983 and 1997-1998 are all the rare intensity over the recent years, while the ENSO cycles are prolonged during 1991~1995. In our the first topic, we make an attempt to find an optimal volatility model, and further to find out a structure point as a line of demarcation of the variation of ENSO. By finding a structure point, we check weather the ENSO volatility has become stronger or weaker tendency.
The second topic is about the world valuation of coral reefs. According to the report of the International Society for Reef Studies, there has been account for 50 countries of the world have occurred a large number and large scale coral bleaching and the main coral reef bleaching areas is from the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean have been extending from the intertidal zone to the 20 metres depth for the sea area, almost all the stone and soft coral have suffered the disaster. The main factor to destroy the coral reef can be divided into man-made and the natural calamity, the former includes over-fish, diving, poisoned fish and the latter includes sea surface temperature rising, the sea level rising. In the second topic, we use two stages to estimate the warmly sea surface temperature caused from the climate change on the valuation of coral reefs. The first step is to estimate the relationship between coral coverage rate and sea surface temperature by running a simple regression. The second step is to estimate the relationship between coral coverage rate, coral reefs area and the valuation of coral reefs by running a meta regression. The main reason to use a meta regression is that available data for coral reefs value is not so popular enough to do a cross analysis or a time series analysis in each region or country. By combining the above result of regression, we can get the relationship between the sea surface temperature and the valuation of coral reefs.
The third topic is about the impact of the variation of precipitation resulted from the climate change on the water transfer price and the social welfare in the southern Taiwan. The southern areas are the main agricultural production in Taiwan. When peasants are unable to grasp the uncertainty factor (like uneven precipitation) resulted from climatic change, peasants will suffer economic losses. Moreover, when industrial sectors are in the face of water shortage, the economic development will be obstructed in southern Taiwan. Climate change has aggravated during the decade, making the higher probability of water shortage take place in this area, therefore how to improve the allocation of water resource has become an important policy for the government. Many researches have suggested that a good policy is about the water transfer from inefficient sector to efficient sector in this area. This good policy has not been enforced because the information about the water transfer price has not been set up.
Therefore, the most important work is to come out with the relevant transfer price at present, and then the related transfer activities and the related subsidization could be enforce in the society. To this end, we try to use a mathematics programming model to calculate the present water transfer price and then to calculated the water transfer price after considering the variation resulted from the climate change. Under the consideration of climate change, the precipitation will be set up for three scenarios which are ECHAM4, CGCM2 and HADCM3 scenarios, and each scenario will have two types with A2 and B2, the water transfer price will be calculated again.
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