Mitigation and adaptation emissions embedded in the broader climate transition

Abstract

Climate change necessitates a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while adapting to increased climate risks. This broader climate transition will involve large-scale global interventions including renewable energy deployment, coastal protection and retreat, and enhanced space cooling, all of which will result in CO 2 emissions from energy and materials use. Yet, the magnitude of the emissions embedded in these interventions remains unconstrained, opening the potential for underaccounting of emissions and conflicts or synergies between mitigation and adaptation goals. Here, we use a suite of models to estimate the CO 2 emissions embedded in the broader climate transition. For a gradual decarbonization pathway limiting warming to 2 °C, selected adaptation-related interventions will emit ∼1.3 GtCO 2 through 2100, while emissions from energy used to deploy renewable capacity are much larger at ∼95 GtCO 2 . Together, these emissions are equivalent to over 2 y of current global emissions and 8.3% of the remaining carbon budget for 2 °C. Total embedded transition emissions are reduced by ∼80% to 21.2 GtCO 2 under a rapid pathway limiting warming to 1.5 °C. However, they roughly double to 185 GtCO 2 under a delayed pathway consistent with current policies (2.7 °C warming by 2100), mainly because a slower transition relies more on fossil fuel energy. Our results provide a holistic assessment of carbon emissions from the transition itself and suggest that these emissions can be minimized through more ambitious energy decarbonization. We argue that the emissions from mitigation, but likely much less so from adaptation, are of sufficient magnitude to merit greater consideration in climate science and policy.

Persistent macroeconomic damages raise social cost of carbon

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Energy Self-Sufficiency of Smaller Rural Centers: Experimental Approaches

“…The decarbonization process can advance at a faster pace with the deployment of renewables, but the synergies and the trade-offs between mitigation goals and the use of renewables must be better understood and integrated into climate policy [5]. The European Union's (EU) long-term climate neutrality targets require that by 2050, at least 16% of the electricity generation has its origins in collective projects and almost half of all European households must be involved in renewable energy generation, 37% of which should be engaged in collective projects [6].…”

Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in electric vehicle charging infrastructure: a method and case study of Georgia, US 2021–2050

“…This expansion suggests a potential concern about embodied emissions in EV charging infrastructure mirroring the burden shifting concern about the EVs themselves, but this issue is not widely explored. Embodied emissions of renewable energy infrastructure has received substantial attention as part of the overall effort to direct the scale and speed of energy system decarbonization [18,19], and embodied emissions of digital infrastructure have come under similar scrutiny [20][21][22]. In particular, this issue arises because zero-carbon infrastructure will be built with carbon-based inputs until the zero-carbon system is large enough to sustain demand.…”