Economic mitigation challenges: how further delay closes the door for achieving climate targets

By Gunnar Luderer, R. Pietzcker, C. Bertram, Elmar Kriegler, Malte Meinshausen, Ottmar Edenhofer. 2013

248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While the international community aims to limit global warming to below 2 ° C to prevent dangerous climate change, little progress has been made towards a global climate agreement to implement the emissions reductions required to reach this target. We use an integrated energy–economy–climate modeling system to examine how a further delay of cooperative action and technology availability affect climate mitigation challenges. With comprehensive emissions reductions starting after 2015 and full technology availability we estimate that maximum 21st century warming may still be limited below 2 ° C with a likely probability and at moderate economic impacts. Achievable temperature targets rise by up to ∼0.4 ° C if the implementation of comprehensive climate policies is delayed by another 15 years, chiefly because of transitional economic impacts. If carbon capture and storage (CCS) is unavailable, the lower limit of achievable targets rises by up to ∼0.3 ° C. Our results show that progress in international climate negotiations within this decade is imperative to keep the 2 ° C target within reach.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d64860571d6bcb3e85366e7b980c12b188bda22

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Environmental Engineering

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Technological Forecasting & Social Change (2014, background): “…by a number of individual model studies (Keppo and Rao, 2007; Bosetti et al., 2009a; Krey and Riahi, 2009; van Vliet et al., 2009; Vliet et al., 2012; Rogelj et al., 2013a,b; Luderer et al., 2013a) and a fewmodel comparison studies (Clarke et al., 2009; Jakob et al., 2012; Luderer et al., 2013b).”
Assessment of wind and solar power in global low-carbon energy scenarios: An introduction (2017, background): “REMIND (Bauer et al., 2012; Luderer et al., 2013; Ueckerdt et al., 2016) and WITCH (Bosetti et al., 2014; Carrara and Marangoni, this issue; Emmerling et al., 2016) are intertemporal general equilibrium models with an explicit description of macro-economic growth.”
Expert assessment concludes negative emissions scenarios may not deliver (2016, background): “Although some IAM runs do present scenarios compatible with 2 °C without BECCS (e.g. Luderer et al 2013), the modelling widely suggests that keeping climate change well below two degrees may not be feasible without BECCS, even with ambitious emission reductions in all sectors (Rogelj et al 2013,…”
Zero emission targets as long-term global goals for climate protection (2015, unknown): “Our median estimate is lower than the IPCC range because our analysis includes studies that explore more stringent mitigation targets ( Luderer et al 2013, Rogelj et al 2013a, 2013b, 2015 ) than those included in the IPCC Scenario Database.”
Evaluating process-based integrated assessment models of climate change mitigation (2017, methodology): “Examples of process-based IAMs include AIM-Enduse (Hibino et al. 2013), GCAM (Iyer et al. 2015), IMACLIM (Waisman et al. 2011), IMAGE (van Vuuren et al. 2015), MESSAGE-GLOBIOM (Krey et al. 2016), and REMIND (Luderer et al. 2013).”
Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects (2018, methodology): “For instance, Luderer et al (2013)—based on the REMIND model—show that mitigation costs defined as the ratio of discounted19 and aggregated 19 Luderer et al (2013) applied a discount rate of 5% to both consumption losses and GDP. consumption losses over discounted and aggregated GDP increase from…”
Using the sun to decarbonize the power sector: The economic potential of photovoltaics and concentrating solar power ☆ (2014, methodology): “The energy-economy-climate model REMIND is a Ramsey-type general equilibrium growth model of the macro-economy in which inter-temporal global welfare is maximized, with a technology-rich representation of the energy system [40]–[42].”
Negative emissions—Part 1: Research landscape and synthesis (2018, background): “…that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere have become an almost indispensable component of strategies to meet the international climate goals established by the Paris Agreement—particularly the 1.5 ◦C goal (Peters 2016, Rogelj et al 2018, 2015, Luderer et al 2013, 2016, Minx et al 2017b).”
A Third Wave in the Economics of Climate Change (2015, methodology): “2010), ENVISAGE (Van der Mensbrugghe 2010), or REMIND (Luderer et al. 2013), model how the economy and climate evolve over time.”
A retrospective analysis of benefits and impacts of U.S. renewable portfolio standards (2016, background): “EPA (2015d) finds that efforts to limit climate change damages through reductions in GHGs can offer many benefits to the United States, and there is growing recognition of the desirability of near-term actions to limit emissions (IPCC 2014a; Luderer et al. 2013; Nordhaus 2013).”