Tutorial 4: Growth and Trade

Motivation

Let's say ABC has economic growth forecasts and data on equipment imports. In this tutorial, we will add growth patterns and import flows to our multi-application model from Tutorial 3, creating a more nuanced business-as-usual baseline to help aid policy analysis. In addition to adding more sophistication to our model, this also demonstrates use of multiple sales streams.

Adding Imports for HFC-134a

Before we add in growth rates, let's consider trade. Specifically, for brevity, let's have just one substance with imports.

Let's say that ABC imports some but not all of their HFC-134a. Therefore, for Domestic Refrigeration, modify your HFC-134a consumption record:

• General tab: Enable "Import" (in addition to existing manufacture)
• Equipment tab: Add 0.20 kg/unit for import.
• Set tab: Change your existing 25 mt by reducing domestic to 13 mt in year 2025 and adding import of 11 mt in year 2025

Our tutorial later will expand this further but this gives us a good starting point.

First Economic Growth

In addition to trade, let's also add in economic growth. For example, these projections might come from industry surveys or from outside modeling efforts. Let's start with HFC-134a:

• Click edit for HFC-134a
• Go to Change tab, add a change record of +6% from 2025 - 2030 for all sales as this will apply to both imports and domestic manufacturing.
• Add a change record of +4% from 2031 - 2035 for all sales.

Expanding the Growth

Let's continue by applying these growth rates using the Change tab for the consumption records. Below is a table of everything that should be present after you are done. However, remember that you already did HFC-134a!

You can go to Change tab and add changes for domestic manufacture stream or all sales, both have the same effect in this case.

Results

Note that the drop down menu under the Consumption radio button which can flip between domestic and imports. Just as we did with the custom metric under emissions before, we can click configure custom to combine imports and domestic together.

Does the imports part of HFC-134a seem small? It's important to note that, by default, initial charge for new equipment is attributed to the exporting country. We can temporarily change this behavior to get a fuller picture of our global consumption by checking Attribute initial charge to importer. However, to stay consistent with Montreal Protocol standards, it is best to leave this off in most cases.

Zooming out, we should see the acceleration in HFC-134a and HFC-32. With the Emissions radio button, things still remain quite dominated by HFC-134a. In contrast, the two are closer when selecting the Consumption radio button as that 10% increase compounds over time for HFC-32.

Conclusion

You now have ABC Country's realistic business-as-usual scenario incorporating economic growth, trade flows, and technology transitions. This foundation shows how consumption evolves without intervention. Later, we will try out different policies on this of this baseline.

Download the completed tutorial: tutorial_04.qta - this contains the complete model with economic growth and trade flows

Next Steps

Tutorial 5 will start to add new sophistication by modeling policies. You'll learn to create sales permitting systems that progressively reduce HFC consumption while managing market displacement to lower-GWP alternatives.

Previous: Tutorial 3 | Next: Tutorial 5