Countries around the world are rapidly building up renewable energy generation capacity in the face of rising fossil fuel prices and pressure over the climate crisis. However, this energy transition has created new challenges, particularly as experts warn the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources like solar and wind mean power has to be stored
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What drives the feasibility of climate scenarios commonly reviewed by organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? And can they actually be achieved in practice? A new systematic framework can help understand what to improve in the next generation of scenarios and explore how to make ambitious emission reductions possible by strengthening enabling conditions.
While the IPCC is in the midst of the drafting cycle of the Sixth Assessment Report, whose publication will start in the second half of 2021, there is an ongoing debate on how to assess the feasibility of ambitious climate mitigation scenarios developed through integrated assessment models and to what extent they are actually achievable in the real world. In their new study published in Environmental Research Letters, researchers from IIASA and the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) developed a systematic framework that allows identifying the type, timing,
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IMAGE: Illustrative example of the interpretation of the NLPs using Japan as a case study view more
Credit: Fujimori et al.
With the COP Climate conference in Glasgow only a few months away, the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and the importance of taking action at the national level to reach global climate goals is returning to the spotlight. IIASA researchers and colleagues have proposed a novel systematic and independent scenario framework that could help policymakers assess and compare climate policies and long-term strategies across countries to support coordinated global climate action.
The Paris Agreement defines a long-term temperature goal for international climate policy: holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C . Its achievement critically depends on actions and policymaking at the regional, national, and subnational level
A new study published in the journal
Science, highlights the opportunity to complement current climate mitigation scenarios with scenarios that capture the interdependence among investors perception of future climate risk, the credibility of climate policies, and the allocation of investments across low- and high-carbon assets in the economy.
Climate mitigation scenarios are key to understanding the transition to a low-carbon economy and inform climate policies. These scenarios are also important for financial investors to assess the risk of missing out on the transition or making the transition happen too late and in a disorderly fashion. In this respect, the scenarios developed by the platform of financial authorities known as the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) - a platform of over 80 financial authorities around the globe who take an active interest in advancing the transition toward a sustainable world economy - have been a major step to provide investors wi