A method to identify barriers to and enablers of implementing climate change mitigation options

Historical diffusion of nuclear, wind and solar power in different national contexts: implications for climate mitigation pathways

“…Our analysis demonstrates the potential to use empirically-grounded benchmarks for informing climate mitigation scenarios through systematically constructed feasibility spaces. The empiricallybenchmarked feasibility spaces could be used in conjunction with other feasibility assessment methods, including those based on models and detailed analysis of concrete barriers and driving forces [14,15]. There is an extensive research agenda to understand whether and if so to what extent specific causal mechanisms such as cost declines of renewables, stronger climate policies (for example the US Inflation Reduction Act), and energy security crises accelerate energy transitions.…”

“…Low and declining costs of wind and solar power combined with their low emissions lead them to dominate cost-optimal mitigation pathways as compared to more expensive nuclear power [1]. Yet, there are numerous social factors beyond costs that affect technology diffusion [12][13][14][15][16] such as technology complexity and granularity [17][18][19][20], politics [21][22][23], institutional capacities [24,25], and social acceptance [26][27][28][29][30]. How might these other factors affect the future growth of renewables and nuclear power?…”

The feasibility of climate action: Bridging the inside and the outside view through feasibility spaces

“…The IPCC proposed a framework for analyzing the feasibility of climate options in its Special Report 1.5 (de Coninck et al, 2018; Solecki et al, 2018), which was subsequently refined by several teams of IPCC authors (Brutschin et al, 2021; Singh et al, 2020; Steg et al, 2022). This framework is called “multidimensional” because it is based on six categories (“dimensions”)—economic, technological, socio‐cultural, institutional, geophysical, and ecological/environmental—that aim to comprehensively capture all categories of causal factors that can affect the implementation of any climate option (Steg et al, 2022).…”

“…However, this approach raises two methodological challenges: (a) how to consistently assign scores for individual indicators across different climate options and (b) how to aggregate the scores across multiple indicators for the same option. The first problem can be illustrated through Steg's et al's (2022) argument that electric vehicles and industry electrification face barriers of public acceptance, legal and institutional capacity, while solar electricity does not face any such barriers. This claim is difficult to justify (Baldwin et al, 2016; Cousse, 2021) unless there are dedicated studies systematically analyzing the three options against the three criteria.…”

“…With respect to reflexively addressing the agency of their users, the studies using the multidimensional framework have so far aimed to inform a similarly broad audience as global climate scenarios. For example, Roe et al (2021) propose to use their analysis of land‐use mitigation feasibility “to plan and prioritize country‐specific policies and measures” and offer “key considerations for external actors who seek to help [developing] countries mobilize their mitigation potential.” Singh et al's (2020) feasibility assessment of adaptation aims at “global and national policymakers as well as nongovernmental adaptation decision‐makers and practitioners.” The methods and findings of such assessments are presented alongside global scenarios in the IPCC reports however, their stated purpose shifted from assessing feasibility (as in SR1.5 see de Coninck et al (2018) and IPCC AR6 Annex II IPPC (2022a)) to “identify[ing] barriers to and enablers of implementing climate […] options” and to “provide[ing] critical information to governments and decision makers on what factors would need to be targeted to improve the feasibility of options to ensure [they] can be implemented at scale on a timely basis” (Steg et al, 2022, p. 1218). This may signal a shift of the IPCC away from assessing the feasibility of what is possible, potentially reflecting the limitation of science‐policy interactions discussed in the previous section.…”