Companies are increasingly seeking to align their actions with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Over 1000 such companies have committed to the science-based targets initiative which seeks to align corporate carbon reduction targets with global decarbonisation trajectories. These ‘science-based targets’ are developed using a common set of resources and target-setting methodologies, then independently assessed and approved by a technical advisory group. Despite the initiative’s rapid rise to public prominence, it has received little attention to date in the academic literature. This paper discusses development of the initiative based upon a quantitative assessment of progress against each component of the science-based targets set by 81 early adopters, using information gathered from company annual reports, corporate social responsibility websites and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) responses. The analysis reveals a mixed picture of progress. Though the majority of targets assessed were on track and, in some cases, had already been achieved, just under half of the companies assessed were falling behind on one or more of their targets. Progress varied significantly by target scope, with more limited progress against targets focused on Scope 3 emissions. Company reporting practices were highly variable and often of poor quality. This paper concludes with a range of recommendations to improve the transparency, consistency and comparability of targets within this key agenda-setting initiative.
In recent years, global studies have attempted to understand the contribution that energy demand reduction could make to climate mitigation efforts. Here we develop a bottom-up, whole-system framework that comprehensively estimates the potential for energy demand reduction at a country level. Replicable for other countries, our framework is applied to the case of the United Kingdom where we find that reductions in energy demand of 52% by 2050 compared with 2020 levels are possible without compromising on citizens’ quality of life. This translates to annual energy demands of 40 GJ per person, compared with the current Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average of 116 GJ and the global average of 55 GJ. Our findings show that energy demand reduction can reduce reliance on high-risk carbon dioxide removal technologies, has moderate investment requirements and allows space for ratcheting up climate ambition. We conclude that national climate policy should increasingly develop and integrate energy demand reduction measures.
There is increasing interest in natural flood management (NFM) and the delivery of public environmental goods. Yet the implementation of NFM can be ad-hoc and is regionally diverse. Communities often play a role in NFM and thus we assess NFM governance in the UK and communities' position within it. We develop a theoretical framework using the concepts of public goods, social capital, collective action and polycentrism and use it to examine the governance of the design and implementation of NFM in Pickering and Calderdale in Yorkshire, to contribute to a debate on how NFM should be managed, by whom, and under what governance arrangements.Drawing on stakeholder interviews, we find that the participation of community flood groups (CFGs) in NFM improved community access to strategic conversations on flood risk management (FRM). In turn CFGs raised the public profile of NFM, enabled the deployment of NFM measures, and helped to generate the evidence base on them. We conclude that there is a need for a polycentric community and catchmentbased approach to better coordinate NFM governance across and between scales, to support community access and contribution to flood risk strategy, and to foster sustainable flood risk management.
With the UK's legislation of a 2050 net zero emissions target, there is urgent need for radical industrial decarbonisation. The steel sector represented 12% of UK industrial emissions in 2016 and is therefore a critical target for mitigation. Mainstream scenario analyses variously assume use of unproven Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) or reductions to steel demand in order to reach a 1.5 • C compatible budget by 2050. This analysis aims to: a) assess the mitigation potential of current technology options (excluding CCS) towards a cumulative budget aligned to net zero and assuming constant steel demand; b) to evaluate the potential of material efficiency to close any mitigation gaps, (where material efficiency is providing the same useful 'service' with less input of energy-intensive materials); and c) to discuss the importance of sectoral budget assumptions and other uncertainties in estimating the scale of future mitigation required by the industry and the policy implications of this. We modelled four key technology scenarios including steel plant retrofit, replacement of steelmaking technologies to best practice standards, fuel shifts to greater Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) production, and implementation of selected novel technologies, under different ambition levels. Technology scenarios could reduce cumulative Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (2016-2050) by as much as 44% against a constant baseline, whilst coupled technology and material efficiency scenarios could achieve reductions of as much as 53%. We also find that whilst grid electricity decarbonisation and earlier demand reduction can achieve additional mitigation, there may still be a need for some CCS capacity in the long-term to address residual emissions. In the most ambitious case, absolute GHG emissions from the steel sector reduced by 80% by 2050 against 2016 levels, assuming grid decarbonisation. We found that the most effective interventions were through established technologies, such as retrofit, replacement and EAF production, since they were immediately available, with the condition they are implemented faster than previously observed. Given the commercialisation constraints of novel technologies, structural shifts such as material efficiency and EAF production were considered highly important. However, structural changes are necessarily more complex to influence via policy, and there is little precedent for structural change by design in the UK. Our results show that only complementary scenarios combining material efficiency and technology options would achieve a level of mitigation near to net zero in the UK. We conclude that it is possible to achieve net zero emissions in the UK steel sector, but that this would require greater and earlier levels of material efficiency and some degree of CCS removal capacity.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.