How to Reduce Emissions and Maintain Prosperity

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

At present China plans to spread its carbon-trading system from major cities to the whole country in the next five years. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, announced in August, introduces the prospect of US states using emissions trading systems in future.

However, Mirabelle does not expect trading schemes to be central to Paris COP 21. She says: “These systems are mainly national and it would be difficult to establish a global carbon market at this time. I would expect a key element of COP 21 to include talks of new climate finance schemes, such as financial support to developing nations.”

Mirabelle is also looking to the future by training a new generation of leaders with both scientific knowledge and business skills, in her role as the programme director of Imperial’s new MSc in Climate Change, Management & Finance.

Intelligent action

AVOID 2 is a UK government programme involving a multi- disciplinary consortium of UK research organisations, led by the Met Office with the Grantham Institute as a core partner. The aim is to provide government analysts and climate negotiating teams in both the UK and internationally with the science needed to inform their decisions, leading up to Paris 2015.

The AVOID 2 research programme provides evidence under three main themes: ‘climate system’, which includes plausible emissions trajectories associated with different levels of warming; ‘climate impacts’, which aims to understand the consequences of emissions trajectories such as ocean acidification as well economic shocks; and finally ‘climate mitigation’, which examines deployment of new technologies and realistically achievable behavioural and social change.

“AVOID 2 analysis has highlighted how important it is to begin coordinated global decarbonisation by 2020,” says the programme’s lead at Imperial, Grantham Senior Research Fellow Ajay Gambhir (inset, below). “We need to use energy more efficiently, increasingly electrify our energy systems and produce electricity without greenhouse gas emissions. We are feeding these messages to policy makers ahead of COP 21 in Paris.”

AVOID 2 analysis has been made possible by TIAM-Grantham, a computer model that calculates the most cost-effective ways to change an energy system reliant on fossil fuels, into a low-carbon system, based on a wider variety of technologies. Grantham Affiliate Dr Adam Hawkes (inset, below), who is Deputy Director at Imperial’s Sustainable Gas Institute, leads the development of the model. “We draw on the technological and economic expertise from across the College to create the most robust representation of energy futures for the whole world up to the year 2100,” he says. “The insights of the Faculty of Engineering and the Business School allow us to investigate the impact of game- changing developments such as solar. The Institute brings all this expertise together to create a tool that can have significant impact on policy.”

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