• Energy Research

The impacts of increasing natural climate disasters are threatening food security in the Asia-Pacific region. Rice is Asia’s most important staple food. Climate variability and change directly impact rice production, through changes in rainfall, temperature and CO2 concentrations. The key for sustainable rice crop is water management. Adaptation can occur through shifts of cropping to higher latitudes and can profit from river systems (via irrigation) so far not considered. New opportunities arise to produce more than one crop per year in cooler areas. Asian wheat production in 2005 represents about 43 % of the global total. Changes in agronomic practices, such as earlier plant dates and cultivar substitution will be required. Fisheries play a crucial role in providing food security with the contribution of fish to dietary animal protein being very high in the region – up to 90 % in small island developing states (SIDS). With the warming of the Pacific and Indian Oceans and increased acidification, marine ecosystems are presently under stress. Despite these trends, maintaining or enhancing food production from the sea is critical. However, future sustainability must be maintained whilst also securing biodiversity conservation. Improved fisheries management to address the existing non-climate threats remains paramount in the Indian and Pacific Oceans with sustainable management regimes being established. Climate-related impacts are expected to increase in magnitude over the coming decades, thus preliminary adaptation to climate change is valuable.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement have ushered in a new era of policymaking to deliver on the formulated goals. Energy policies are key to ensuring universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy (SDG7). Yet they can also have considerable impact on other goals. To successfully achieve multiple goals concurrently, policies need to balance different objectives and manage their interactions. Refining previously contemplated design principles, we identify three key principles - complementary, transparency and adaptability - as highly pertinent for multiple-objective energy policies based on a synthesis of seventeen coordinated policy case studies. First, policies should entail complementary measures and design provisions that specifically target non-energy objectives (complementarity). Second, policy impacts should be tracked comprehensively in both energy and non-energy domains to uncover diminishing returns and facilitate policy learning (transparency). Third, policies should be capable of adapting to changing objectives over time (adaptability). These principles are rarely considered in current policies, implying the need to mainstream them into the next generation of policymaking by pointing to best practices and new tools.

This study assesses global, long-term economic availability of coal, oil and gas within the Shared Socio-economic Pathway (SSP) scenario framework considering alternative assumptions as to highly uncertain future developments of technology, policy and the economy. Diverse sets of trajectories are formulated varying the challenges to mitigation and adaptation of climate change. The potential CO2 emissions from fossil fuels make it a crucial element subject to deep uncertainties. The analysis is based on a well-established dataset of cost-quantity combinations that assumes favorable techno-economic developments, but ignores additional constraints on the extraction sector. This study significantly extends the analysis by specifying alternative assumptions for the fossil fuel sector consistent with the SSP scenario families and applying these filters (mark-ups and scaling factors) to the original dataset, thus resulting in alternative cumulative fossil fuel availability curves. In a Middle-of-the-Road scenario, low cost fossil fuels embody carbon consistent with a RCP6.0 emission profile, if all the CO2 were emitted freely during the 21st century. In scenarios with high challenges to mitigation, the assumed embodied carbon in low-cost fossil fuels can trigger a RCP8.5 scenario; low mitigation challenges scenarios are still consistent with a RCP4.5 scenario.

It is suggested in the proposal of the 11th Five Year Plan (from 2006 to 2010) that the total reduction rate of energy intensity per GDP (2005–2010) should be 20%. The annual reduction rate of energy intensity between 2005 and 2010 must reach 4.3% to meet this goal, and the elasticity of energy consumption should be less than 0.5. However, given that in 2000–2005 the average elasticity of energy consumption was as high as 1.084, it will be a great challenge to achieve the goal. We characterize the progress on energy efficiency in the context of the overall Chinese energy system, including both government policies and business efforts. When reviewing recent progress made (until 2007), major energy efficiency improvements can be observed. China is now adopting best efficiency practice in its newly installed capacity. This paper presents the policy packages and efficiency achievements in industry and other sectors.

The most important achievement in the Paris Agreement is to set up emission reduction target by commitment submitted by each country/region with the form INDC. However the emission reduction target inside INDCs could not match with the emission pathway for the global to keep a global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C and to drive efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. It is important for countries to do more than their commitment in INDCs, especially in near term. This paper looks at the near term trend for possibilities for further emission reduction compared with INDCs, and found there do have the possibility. It concludes there is space for the four countries/regions to do more than their INDCs submitted to UNFCCC, and see the light towards to a global 2 °C target.

China has experienced serious fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in recent years, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be controlled so that China can keep its pledge to reduce CO2 emissions by 2030. The iron and steel industry is energy intensive and contributes significantly to PM2.5 pollution in China. The simultaneous reduction of CO2 emissions and PM2.5 pollution while minimizing the total mitigation costs remains a crucial issue that must be resolved. Using a multi-objective analysis, we compared potential technology combinations based on various policy preferences and targets. Our results showed that policies designed to mitigate PM2.5 pollution have substantial co-benefits for CO2 emissions reductions. However, policies focused solely on reducing CO2 emissions fail to effectively reduce PM2.5. Furthermore, CO2 emissions reductions correspond to large financial costs, whereas PM2.5 pollution reductions are less expensive. Our results suggest that under limited budgets, decision makers should prioritize PM2.5 reductions because CO2 reductions may be simultaneously achieved. Achieving large decreases in CO2 emissions will require further technological innovations to reduce the cost threshold. Thus, China should focus on reducing PM pollution in the short term and prepare for the expected challenges associated with CO2 reductions in the future.

In 2010, Asia accounted for 60% of global population, 39% of Gross World Product, 44% of global energy consumption and nearly half of the world's energy system CO2 emissions. Thus, Asia is an important region to consider in any discussion of climate change or climate change mitigation. This paper explores the role of Asia in mitigating climate change, by comparing the results of 23 energy-economy and integrated assessment models. We focus our analysis on seven key areas: base year data, future energy use and emissions absent climate policy, the effect of urban and rural development on future energy us and emissions, the role of technology in emissions mitigation, regional emissions mitigation, and national climate policies.

Abstract The Paris Agreement invited Parties to develop low-emission development strategies. This study presents national low-emission scenarios to inform such strategies for Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, EU-28, India, Indonesia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russia and the USA. We use country-level technology-rich energy-economy and integrated assessment models that include detailed representations of the energy, transport and land systems and provide insights on emissions, energy system and economic implications of low-emission pathways until 2050. We show that the low-emission pathways of most economies studied here are consistent with pathways limiting global temperature increase to well-below 2 °C, while emission reductions are achieved through uptake of renewable energy, energy efficiency improvements and electrification of energy services. The role of mitigation options like nuclear, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and advanced biofuels is differentiates across countries, depending on national priorities, specificities and resource endowments. The energy system transformation requires a pronounced reallocation of investments towards low-carbon technologies, but without raising significant affordability issues in most countries. National pathways improve the consistency between country policy plans with global temperature goals and capture structural heterogeneities and broad socio-economic considerations.