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Closing the emissions gap between Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the global emissions levels needed to achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate goals will require a comprehensive package of policy measures. National and sectoral policies can help fill the gap, but success stories in one country cannot be automatically replicated in other countries. They need to be adapted to the local context. Here, we develop a new Bridge scenario based on nationally relevant, short-term measures informed by interactions with country experts. These good practice policies are rolled out globally between now and 2030 and combined with carbon pricing thereafter. We implement this scenario with an ensemble of global integrated assessment models. We show that the Bridge scenario closes two-thirds of the emissions gap between NDC and 2 °C scenarios by 2030 and enables a pathway in line with the 2 °C goal when combined with the necessary long-term changes, i.e. more comprehensive pricing measures after 2030. The Bridge scenario leads to a scale-up of renewable energy (reaching 52%–88% of global electricity supply by 2050), electrification of end-uses, efficiency improvements in energy demand sectors, and enhanced afforestation and reforestation. Our analysis suggests that early action via good-practice policies is less costly than a delay in global climate cooperation.

In June, 2019, Japan submitted its mid-century strategy to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and pledged 80% emissions cuts by 2050. The strategy has not gone through a systematic analysis, however. The present study, Stanford Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) 35 Japan Model Intercomparison project (JMIP), employs five energy-economic and integrated assessment models to evaluate the nationally determined contribution and mid-century strategy of Japan. EMF 35 JMIP conducts a suite of sensitivity analyses on dimensions including emissions constraints, technology availability, and demand projections. The results confirm that Japan needs to deploy all of its mitigation strategies at a substantial scale, including energy efficiency, electricity decarbonization, and end-use electrification. Moreover, they suggest that with the absence of structural changes in the economy, heavy industries will be one of the hardest to decarbonize. Partitioning of the sum of squares based on a two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) reconfirms that mitigation strategies, such as energy efficiency and electrification, are fairly robust across models and scenarios, but that the cost metrics are uncertain. There is a wide gap of policy strength and breadth between the current policy instruments and those suggested by the models. Japan should strengthen its climate action in all aspects of society and economy to achieve its long-term target.

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a b s t r a c tWe quantified key factors affecting the penetration of global onshore wind energy by 2050. We analyzed a large set of scenarios by combining a wind resource model and a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Five factors, including onshore wind resource potential, investment cost, balancing cost, transmission cost and climate change mitigation policy, were considered to generate 96 scenarios and regression analysis was used to assess relevance among the factors. We found that the strongest factors were resource potential and climate target, followed by wind power technology investment cost. Other factors, such as balancing and transmission costs, had relatively smaller impacts. World total onshore wind power in 2050 increases by 13.2 and 15.5 (41% and 49% of 2005 total power generation, respectively) EJ/year if wind potential rises from low to medium and high levels, respectively. Furthermore, 5.9, 17.8, and 24.3 EJ/year of additional wind power could be generated under climate targets of 650, 550 and 450 ppm CO 2-eq , respectively. Moreover, reducing wind power technology investment cost would increase global wind power by another 9.2 EJ/year. The methodology can be extended to assess other mitigation technologies if the related data is available.

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