CHARTING A COLLABORATIVE PATH TO CONFRONTING GLOBAL WARMING

Sixteen countries are working together on a model for meeting Paris Agreement targets. KAYA WILSON reports.

AS THE NEED FOR coordinated action on climate change intensifies, pragmatic approaches to genuine collaboration are an ever more pressing requirement.

That makes the recent contribution of the Deep Decarbonisation Pathways Project (DDPP) particularly significant.

A collaboration between 16 countries that collectively are responsible for 74% of global CO2 emissions, the project has demonstrated a method of international cooperation that could help the world meet, and hopefully exceed, its global warming targets.

And it has produced a how-to guide for countries around the world.

Led by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (UNSDSN) and the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) in Paris, the DDPP is the first global effort to identify practical pathways to net-zero emissions by 2050.

Australia is one of the partners, along with France, the UK, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, China, Japan, South Africa, South Korea and Indonesia.

In the March edition of the journal Nature Communications, the DDPP published a paper entitled A pathway design framework for national low greenhouse gas emission development strategies. The paper was co-authored by researchers from all participating countries and the DDPP’s coordinators, the IDDRI’s Henri Waisman and Chris Bataille, and it did two important things.

First, it outlined mid-century lowemission pathways for all 16 countries, based on an innovative framework, and described how that framework could support the development of sectorally and technologically detailed, policy-relevant and country-driven strategies consistent with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Second, it presented modelling showing emissions reductions consistent with the goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Models based on the efforts of all countries involved show cumulative greenhouse gas emissions between 2010 and 2050 in the range 1185 to 1555 gigatonnes of CO2. This is consistent with the range identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for a 50% likelihood of keeping warming to two degrees.

Reducing emissions further would increase this likelihood, and Waisman, Bataille and colleagues argue in their paper that the pathways they have developed could be employed to get the figure closer to 1.5 degrees.

The release of the paper is certainly timely. The first five-year review of the national contributions of the Paris Agreement will be held in 2020.

The DDPP was established in 2013, two years before the Paris Agreement’s inception, and initially set itself a target of keeping warming to two degrees.

“At the time, the idea of two degrees Celsius and net-zero by 2050 was quite nascent,” says Tom Yankos of independent research organisation ClimateWorks Australia.

“As the science has improved, and our understanding of the impacts of two degrees Celsius warming, we’ve come to understand that we need to do more, and that was reflected in the Paris Agreement.”

The Paris Agreement invites countries to define their own contributions to the shared temperature goal, in the context of their specific national capacities. A further requirement is for these contributions to become progressively more ambitious.

To date, however, there has been a “widely acknowledged lack of collective ambition”, Waisman and Bataille suggest. The DDPP’s proposed pathways are designed to accelerate national contributions at the 2020 review.

The DDPP’s core focus is on the well-established “three pillars of decarbonisation”: energy efficiency, energy decarbonisation, and user migration to low carbon energy providers.

A major finding of its research was that country-specific uncertainties were not suitable for standard risk analysis. It concluded that a better approach was to have multiple strategies in place for decarbonisation that were contingent on different plausible futures.

The uncertainties in question varied.

Canada, for example, was concerned with varying oil prices whereas Italy addressed the social acceptability of Carbon, Capture and Storage (CCS).

Using the DDPP approach, Canada could design multiple strategies contingent on different oil price futures. Similarly, Italy could create different plans based on the public perception of CCS.

To date there has been a ‘widely acknowledged lack of collective ambition’.

Yankos believes the DDPP emphasis on engaging with stakeholders brought cohesion to these multiple futures.

“The process itself wasn’t just a piece of analysis or research that was developed in isolation and then pushed out. It was something that was developed in collaboration with a systematic effort to engage stakeholders,” he says.

“So where political cycles are inevitable, by engaging a broad base of stakeholders, we were able to ensure there was buy-in and tangible action that can happen by keeping people along for the journey.”

DDPP has globalised these national concerns, employing a hybrid approach of such bottom-up endeavours with the overview of global assessment models.

For cross-country comparison and global assessment, it has developed a collective “dashboard” to serve as a transparent aggregator of data.

And it developed a novel approach called “backcasting”. Using the input of the 2050 net-zero emissions target, the method was used to calculate an emissions trajectory back to the present day. This reverse-forecasting enabled policy makers to make decisions that directly related to the 2050 net-zero and two degrees Celsius temperature goals.

Yankos describes backcasting as one of the significant improvements to Australia’s emissions reduction planning.

“Backcasting is really a break from the old ideas of looking at incremental change,” he says. “Looking at the end goal and working backwards from that, you can align near term planning with long term goals.”

Under the DDPP model, each country prepares a report describing its specific challenges. Carbon sequestration was a significant focus for Australia in the context of a future global economy with heavy carbon constraints.

“The focus on sequestration is a reflection of the physical endowments of Australia, relative to the other countries in question, which don’t have the same options,” says Yankos.

Australia has more arable land per capita than any other G20 country, offering significant potential for carbon forestry.

Further improvements are needed to the DDPP process in order to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement. These include taking into account all emissions sources that were not explicitly covered.

More ambitious benchmarks will also be required, and participation must be expanded to include more than 16 countries. But it’s a really good start.