Scenarios of the Global Climate Energy System

More than 300 energy experts collaborated over the last four years on the Global Energy Assessment (GEA). The Report, forthcoming in Summer 2011, aims at providing the technical and scientific basis for the evaluation of social, economic, technological, and environmental challenges linked to energy. This talk focuses on findings of the GEA energy scenario analysis. The scenarios explore transformative changes of the energy system in order to meet a range of sustainability objectives. Specifically, they assesses technical measures, policies, and related costs and benefits for providing almost universal access to affordable clean cooking fuel and electricity for the poor, limiting air pollution and health damages from energy use, improving energy security throughout the world, and limiting climate change to below 2C compared to preindustrial levels. Results from the scenario analysis indicate that the transformation towards ambitious sustainability objectives is technically possible, and that alternative combinations of resources, technologies, and policies are conceivable to attain the objectives. Three illustrative pathways (GEA-Supply, GEA-Mix, and GEA-Efficiency) are selected from a large ensemble of possible transformations. They depict salient branching points for policy implementation and highlight different degrees of freedom and routes to the sustainability objectives.

Speaker: Keywan Riahi, Senior Research Scholar and Acting Leader of the Energy Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)