Abstract
This paper investigates the extent to which uncertainty on regional patterns of economic growth and fossil fuel availability impacts regional emission patterns, emission drivers, and regional mitigation potentials and strategies, through an analysis across five key world regions in different stages of their economic development (Africa, India, China, Europe and the USA) using a set of scenarios simulated with the REMIND model. Important differences are identified in emission trajectories of developed, emerging and developing regions, in both the baseline and the climate policy scenarios, due to differences in economic growth rates, energy and carbon intensity developments, and mitigation potentials. In the baseline, energy intensity developments vary strongly with economic growth assumptions, while fossil fuel availability has a particularly strong effect on carbon intensity developments which result in more region-specific sensitivity than do economic growth variations. On the other hand, the core findings associated to climate policy and regional mitigation strategies remain unaffected by this uncertainty. In all baseline scenarios China, the USA and India are the greatest emitters in terms of cumulated 21st century emissions, comprising almost 50 % of the global total. Differences in terms of per capita emissions between developed and developing countries persist under either baseline assumption, but are contracted under climate policy. Long-term per capita emissions remain above world average in China, India and Europe, reflecting their relatively smaller renewable resource potentials. The core regional technological implications of climate change mitigation are insensitive to economic growth and fossil fuel availability assumptions.
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Notes
Further details on the development and description of the scenarios can be found in Kriegler et al. (2013) and at http://www.rose-project.org/scenarios.
Autonomous energy intensity reductions refer to reductions of energy input per unit of economic output that would occur in the absence of climate policies due to technological progress.
Energy intensity improvements due to changes in the sectoral composition of the economy are not explicitly represented.
A detailed description of the REMIND version used in this study can be found in Kriegler et al. (this issue) and Bauer et al. (this issue).
In 2005, the USA and China emit about 21 % of global emissions, Europe about 15 %, India almost 5 %, and sub Saharan Africa a modest 0.6 %. Regarding cumulated 21st century emissions, China is the greatest emitter (23 % of global emissions), followed by the USA and India (13 %, 12 %, respectively), and then Europe and Africa (9 and 7 %, respectively) (SM Table 1).
For example in Africa, the capital to energy ratio sees an almost ten-fold increase between 2010 and 2100, while on the other extreme in Europe it less than triples.
These changes in carbon intensities are the main reason for the trends of per capita emissions in the USA (Figure 1) and are driven by a) an increase in the use of gas accompanied by a decrease in coal and oil which reduce emissions in the short term, b) a renascence of coal used for coal-to-liquids for transportation around mid-century, and c) finally a switch towards renewable energy sources in the power sector in the longer term (SM Figure 6).
This result is sensitive to model assumptions on the energy options available to the transport sector, since the model version used for this study (REMIND 1.4) did not account for the possibility of liquefied gas.
One exception is the USA where abated emissions for 450 HI Fos are lower than those of 450 DEF, due to lower emissions also in the associated baseline scenarios, motivated by the carbon intensity reductions analysed in section 3.1.2.
REMIND is an inter-temporal optimization model with perfect foresight, where social inter-temporal trade-offs are solved by assuming a full set of future markets on which demand and supply are cleared. The full anticipation of the assumed changes in fossil energy supply and long-term future GDP growth impacts on energy price adjustments such that all future markets are cleared and thus implies also near-term changes due to the inter-temporal structure.
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This work was funded by Stiftung Mercator (www.stiftung-mercator.de).
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This article is part of a Special Issue on “The Impact of Economic Growth and Fossil Fuel Availability on Climate Protection” with Guest Editors Elmar Kriegler, Ottmar Edenhofer, Ioanna Mouratiadou, Gunnar Luderer, and Jae Edmonds.
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Mouratiadou, I., Luderer, G., Bauer, N. et al. Emissions and their drivers: sensitivity to economic growth and fossil fuel availability across world regions. Climatic Change 136, 23–37 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1368-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1368-4