fpslider – CD-LINKS

Low Emission Development Strategies around the World: Linking Climate Action and Sustainable Development

The CD-LINKS final conference was held 27 September 2019 at the Borschette Conference Centre in Brussels, jointly with the final conference for the AFRICA-LEDs project. The joint event brought together stakeholders, policy experts and two groundbreaking EU-funded projects that have been working in this area for several years, to present the project results and discuss implications for climate, energy and development policies.

As 2020 approaches, countries around the world face the challenges of updating and implementing their Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) pledges under the Paris Agreement, preparing Long Term Strategies looking towards 2050, and pursuing the UN Sustainable Development Goals alongside national development priorities.

Africa-LEDS worked with seven African countries on Low Emission Development Strategies. The project focused on working with policymakers to demonstrate how NDC implementation can contribute to socioeconomic priorities, including through enhancing national capacities in the use of models as decision support tools.

CD–LINKS focused on linking climate and development policies among the largest emitting countries around the world. The project brought together leading institutes from G20 countries and beyond to improve the global knowledge base, strengthen the global research network and reinforce each country’s capacity to build global and national low emission pathways.

For more information on the research projects:

Africa LEDS project (www.africaleds.org)

CD-LINKS project (www.cd-links.org)

Agenda (pdf)

New CD-LINKS Research Forecasts High Emitting Countries to Suffer Economic Damages from Climate Change

Novel international study indicates actual cost of global warming will be highest for the three top emitting countries (China, India and US), and globally higher and more unequal than normally assumed. Among the authors, scientists from EIEE (European Institute on Economics and the Environment), the partnership between RFF (Resources for the Future), the energy and environmental economics think tank based in Washington DC, and member of the CD-LINKS consortium CMCC Foundation – Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change. The paper is published in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change.

For the first time, researchers have developed a data set quantifying what the social cost of carbon—the measure of the economic harm from carbon dioxide emissions—will be for each of the globe’s nearly 200 countries, and the results are surprising. The top 3 emitting countries – India, China and the US – have the most to lose from climate change. Gulf countries like Saudia Arabia also score very high.

The findings, led by an international team of scientists and which appear in Nature Climate Change, estimate country-level contributions to the social cost of carbon (SCC) using recent climate model projections, empirical climate-driven economic damage estimations and socioeconomic forecasts. In addition to revealing that some counties are expected to suffer more than others from carbon emissions, they also show the global social cost of carbon is significantly higher than the one typically used.

Among the state-of-the-art contemporary estimates of SCC are those calculated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The latest figures range from $12 to $62 per metric ton of CO2 emitted by 2020; however the new data shows that SCC to be approximately $180–800 per ton of carbon emissions. What’s more, the country-level SCC for India, China, US and Saudia Arabia alone are estimated to be above $20 per ton – higher than the carbon prices of the European Trading System – the largest CO2 market in the world.

“We all know carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels affects people and ecosystems around the world, today and in the future; however these impacts are not included in market prices, creating an environmental externality whereby consumers of fossil fuel energy do not pay for and are unaware of the true costs of their consumption,” said lead author, UC San Diego assistant professor Kate Ricke. “Evaluating the economic cost associated with climate is valuable on a number of fronts, as these estimates are used to inform environmental regulation and rulemakings.”

In order to model the effects of CO2 emissions on country-level temperatures, the authors use an innovative approach by combining results from several climate and carbon cycle modelling experiments to capture the magnitude and geographic pattern of warming under different greenhouse gas emission trajectories, and the carbon-cycle and climate system response to carbon emissions.

Since carbon dioxide is a global pollutant, previous analysis has focused on the global social cost of carbon; however a country-by-country breakdown of the economic damage global warming will cause is important for various reasons.

“Our analysis demonstrates that the economic costs of climate change will be high in many countries, including ones like the US and Gulf Countries which traditionally have not taken leadership on climate policy” said Massimo Tavoni, Associate Prof. at Politecnico di Milano, Director of EIEE – European Institute on Economics and the Environment and an author of the study. “Moreover, 90% of the world countries will lose from climate, and these impacts will exacerbate global inequality and international tensions. Many countries have not yet recognised the risk posed by climate change. This study aims at filling this gap”.

The authors have harnessed the power of data science by generating hundreds of scenarios spanning socio-economic, climate, and impact uncertainties. This complex space has revealed many clear insights as well as many areas of uncertainty. “Although the ranking of world powers affected by climate change is robust across scenarios, the magnitude of the social cost of carbon is subject to considerable uncertainty” says Laurent Drouet, a senior scientist at EIEE, author of the study and developer of a visual interface which allows navigating the results (//country-level-scc.github.io/explorer/).

The authors noted mapping domestic impacts of climate change can help better understand the determinants of international cooperation. The nationally-determined architecture of the Paris climate agreement—and its vulnerability to changing national interests—is one important example.

Research leading to this paper has been partially supported by the European Research Council (ERC), through the project COBHAM, and the Horizon 2020 project CD-LINKS.

The text of this press release has been republished with permission from EIEE.

Implications for climate policy – helping policy makers understand opportunities in Joint Policy Day

On 7 November 2018, CD-LINKS, GREEN-WIN and TRANSRISK are hosting a Joint Policy Day in Brussels, Belgium.

Climate strategies showing that voluntary nationally determined contributions to meet the Paris Agreement will also be beneficial in terms of other policy objectives at local, national and regional levels are now seen as cornerstones for climate action. This may include national policies that generate environmental and health co-benefits, such as a reduction in air pollution.

The development of shorter-term, multiple-objective and bottom-up climate strategies is further strengthened by implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These provide 2030 targets for all aspects of human development, including climate, water, human health and well-being, social justice, poverty reduction and gender equality. Many of those SDGs, such as human well-being, poverty reduction and gender equality, are prerequisites for governments to address the climate problem – fostering SDGs in the short term will also provide climate benefits in the longer term. Conversely, implementation of the SDGs also illustrates possible trade-off between goals such as, for example, food security and emission reduction through biofuels.

The policy day integrates complementary perspectives on climate goals by collectively presenting the core findings of three EU-funded projects together with their implications for climate policy. Policy makers will need to understand the opportunities that this new framework presents, as well as the potential risks and uncertainties that lie in any proposed transition.

The three EU-funded Horizon 2020 projects featured have helped to address this need from complementary perspectives:

GREEN-WIN focused on macro-economic and green business strategies that address both economic and climate goals, as well as the role finance plays within these;
TRANS-RISK studied risks and uncertainties within low emission transition pathways, and how transitions can be implemented in ways that are economically and sociably feasible; and
CD-LINKS explored the complex interplay between climate action and development, while simultaneously taking both global and national perspectives and thereby informing the design of complementary climate-development policies.

The event is hosted by the Global Climate Forum and will take place at the Royal Library Meeting Center in Brussels, Belgium.

For more information, please email: cd-links.secretariat(@)iiasa.ac.at.

You can find the agenda here.

Clean power is not enough: More action in other sectors needed to meet Paris targets

CO₂ emissions from non-electricity energy uses, such as industry, transport, and heating, are the greatest impediment to meeting the Paris climate targets, according to new research from an international team of scientists working on the CD-LINKS project.

Debates about the Paris climate targets often centre around electricity supply. Yet, even in a world of stringent climate policies and clean power generation, the remaining use of fossil fuels in industry, transport, and heating in buildings could still cause enough CO₂emissions to endanger the climate targets agreed on by the international community. Published in Nature Climate Change, the new study, coauthored by IIASA researchers and led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), is the first to focus specifically on the residual emissions from sectors that are not as easily decarbonised as power generation.

“We wanted to decipher what really makes the difference in terms of carbon budgets and residual emissions. To identify crucial decarbonisation bottlenecks towards 1.5-2°C stabilisation, we focused on the role of fossil fuel emissions that originate in industries like cement or steel making, fuel our transport sector from cars to freight to aviation and goes into heating our buildings,” says Shinichiro Fujimori, a researcher from the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) and Kyoto University in Japan. “These sectors are much more complicated to decarbonise than our energy supply, as there are no such obvious options available as wind and solar electricity generation.”

It is these activities that crucially determine how much CO₂ will be emitted within this century, and how much the world will have to rely on negative emissions technologies if the climate targets are to be met.

The researchers find that for the 1.5°C temperature limit, negative emissions technologies might no longer be just an option, but a necessity. The Paris goal of keeping global warming well below 2°C and further pursuing to limit it to 1.5°C implies a remaining carbon budget of just 200 billion tons of CO₂ until 2100, which is in stark contrast to the 4,000 billion tons of CO₂ that would be emitted until 2100 if current trends continue. Mitigation efforts pledged so far are inadequate to reduce emissions sufficiently. This gives rise to concerns about the increasing reliance on uncertain and potentially risky technologies for so-called negative emissions technologies to remove greenhouse gases from the air, such as bioenergy plantations combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS).

“We found that even with enormous efforts by all countries, including early and substantial strengthening of the intended Nationally Determined Contributions (the NDCs), our calculations show that residual fossil carbon emissions will remain at about 1,000 Gigatons of CO₂,” explains lead author Gunnar Luderer from PIK. “This seems to be a lower end of what can be achieved with even the most stringent climate policies, because much of the residual emissions are already locked-into the system due to existing infrastructures and dependencies on fossil fuels. To aim for the ambitious 1.5°C target for end-of-century warming would mean that an incredibly huge amount of at least 600 Gigatons of CO₂ removal was required.”

The team of computer modelers from Europe, the US, and Japan used seven integrated assessment models to look at different climate change scenarios. Their study is the first to compare scenarios where stricter emissions reduction policies in line with the Paris climate targets are adopted, with scenarios where countries continue with the existing Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) set out as part of the Paris Agreement, which many agree are insufficient to meet the targets.

“Even if we start being serious about emissions reductions today, about 25 years’ worth of today’s emissions are still expected to be produced by the accumulated industrial, transport, and building infrastructure of the world. However, if we follow what countries have promised under the Paris Agreement and wait until after 2030 with serious emissions reductions, even more emissions will be locked in and the world will have to rely much stronger on CO₂removal technologies that remain unproven at scale,” says IIASA researcher Joeri Rogelj.

Not strengthening the NDCs before 2030 would not only increase near-term emissions, but would also hurt the longer-term emission reduction potentials as it locks in even more investments into fossil-based infrastructures, according to their study.

“Climate mitigation might be a complex challenge, but it boils down to quite simple math in the end: If the Paris targets are to be met, future CO₂ emissions have to be kept within a finite budget,” says Elmar Kriegler from PIK, adding: “While it may still be difficult to determine the exact remaining CO₂ budget for 1.5°C, one thing is very clear – ambitions to reduce fossil fuel emissions have to be ramped up substantially and soon to keep doors open to meet the Paris targets.”

Reference

Luderer G, Vrontisi Z, Bertram C, Edelenbosch OY, Pietzcker RC, Rogelj J, De Boer HS, Drouet L, et al. (2018) Residual fossil CO₂ emissions in 1.5-2°C pathways. Nature Climate Change. DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0198-6 [pure.iiasa.ac.at/15340]

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 308329 (ADVANCE) as well as the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no. 642147 (CD-LINKS). PIK also received support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of ENavi, one of the four Kopernikus Projects.

Text adapted from a press release by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany

Visualization of Energy Investment web page published – based on analysis in Nature Energy journal

CD-LINKS has created a visualization web page that was developed based on an analysis published in the journal Nature Energy, which showed that low carbon investments will need to markedly increase if the world is to achieve the Paris Agreement aim of keeping global warming well below 2°C.

The authors of the analysis find that a fundamental transformation of the global energy system can be achieved with a comparatively modest increase in overall investments. However, a radical shift of investments away from fossil fuels and toward renewables and energy efficiency is needed, including dedicated investments into measures to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

As part of the Paris Agreement in 2015, many countries defined Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) designed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The study confirms that current incentives like the NDCs will not provide sufficient impetus for the “pronounced change” in investment portfolios that are needed to transform the energy system.

To keep global temperature rise to 1.5–2°C, investments in low carbon energy and energy efficiency will likely need to overtake investments in fossil fuels as early as 2025 and then grow far higher. The low carbon and energy efficiency “investment gaps” calculated by the researchers are striking. To meet countries’ NDCs, an additional US$130 billion of investment will be needed by 2030, while to achieve the 2°C target the gap is US$320 billion and for 1.5°C it is US$480 billion. These investment figures represent more than a quarter of total energy investments foreseen in the baseline scenario, and up to half in some economies such as China and India.

Key insights of the analysis have been visualized in a user-friendly way with the CD-LINKS Energy Investment Visualization page, the development of which was led by Valentina Bosetti and Laurent Drouet of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC).

More detailed information on this story is available from the IIASA news webpage.