New IEA report calls for urgent action on climate change abatement
Mon 10 June 2013
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In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has called for urgent action by governments to implement four energy policies that would keep climate goals alive without harming economic growth. The Agency launched its 'World Energy Outlook Special Report, Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map', which suggests the need for intensive action before 2020, as the world remains off-track to limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees C.
“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back-burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said at the launch of the report in London. "This report shows that the path we are on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 °C and 5.3 °C, but also finds that much more can be done to tackle energy-sector emissions without jeopardising economic growth.” she continued.
The report also calls for “transformational” change in energy generation worldwide in the longer term, saying that energy-related CO2 emissions rose 1.4% between 2011 and 2012 alone. The agency has designed a so-called '4-for-2 degrees Celsius” scenario, which outlines four near-term “pragmatic and achievable” measures to step up measures to limit the earth's warming and which could reduce emissions by 8% on levels otherwise expected by 2020, without harming economic growth.
In this scenario the share of low-carbon technologies including renewables, nuclear and CCS, reaches 40 percent in 2020, up from the current 32 percent. The four policies in the 4-for-2 degrees Celsius scenario are outlined as:
- Adopting specific energy efficiency measures (49% of the emissions savings);
- Limiting the construction and use of the least-efficient coal-fired power plants (21%);
- Minimising methane (CH4) emissions from upstream oil and gas production (18%);
- Accelerating the (partial) phase-out of subsidies to fossil-fuel consumption (12%).
The publication of the IEA report came as international negotiators gathered in Bonn, Germany, for UN talks aimed at securing the signing of a new global climate treaty, which would impose cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, by 2015.
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