There is a clear path forward on the climate front that achieves rapid decarbonization combined with a swift scale-up in renewable energies.
The strategy, laid out in this new Rockefeller Foundation analysis of data from 190 countries, can keep global warming to acceptable limits this century while sparking a revolution in energy access among the 3.6 billion who now lack steady power.
But success demands swift cooperation among both richer and poorer countries to ensure technological advances all around.
Done right, the world can combat climate change, transform the energy space, and dramatically widen economic opportunity for its neediest populations. This sustained surge of global teamwork is the one feasible path forward.
Should the world fail to cooperate or lurch deeper into disarray, the alternate paths lead to far gloomier—even catastrophic—outcomes.
This report helps blaze a clear path for concerted action. But we have no time to waste.
The Four Scenarios
This analysis, based on inputs from The Climate Impact Lab at Rhodium Group and Catalyst Partners, explores four scenarios in descending order of desirability. The four scenarios described below were built on different underlying assumptions about how energy demand, fossil fuel use, and thus CO2 emissions evolve in developed, emerging, and energy-poor countries – in effect, how fast these groups of countries achieve net-zero emissions. This framework allows us to focus on issues of equity, climate justice, and poverty, and to explore the implications of our choices for the poor and vulnerable, and their access to energy, food, and good health.
Below we describe each of these scenarios along with the assumptions underpinning them and their implications for planetary warming in the century ahead.
Scenario assumptions and descriptions:
For each scenario, we leveraged the formulae behind the carbon budgets outlined in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment report (AR6) to estimate the expected maximum average temperature increase at the 67% confidence level for different greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.
Global Collaboration
Draw a line to predict the level of warming by 2090 in a world where countries cooperate across economical and technical divides to spread new forms of energy access and reduce emissions.
In this scenario, developed economies immediately ramp up mitigation efforts in a manner consistent with their announced carbon pledges under the Paris Agreement, allowing them to meet their 2050 net-zero targets. Emerging economies like China also take measures to implement their own net-zero pledges, with the late 2020s marking a clear inflection point followed by significant emissions reductions, leading to a net zero outcome in 2060.
Energy-poor countries also receive sufficient financial, technological, and technical support to rapidly scale deployments of renewable energy resources within their own economies. This allows them to escape energy poverty by 2040 and to decarbonize in parallel. The result is that emissions in these countries peak in 2040, with net-zero emissions achieved by 2070.
Fossil Fuels for the Poor
Draw a line to predict the level of warming by 2090 in a future where richer countries progress while poorer ones turn increasingly to cheaper fossil fuels.
In this scenario, however, emissions from the energy-poor grouping of countries grow rapidly as they exploit abundant and lower-cost fossil fuel resources that are out of favor in other markets. This allows them to grow out of energy poverty by 2040 at the expense of considerably higher emissions. Three-quarters of all global emissions come from energy-poor countries by 2050 in this scenario. In effect, this scenario envisages clean energy for the rich and fossil fuels for the poor.
Business as Usual
Draw a line to predict the level of warming by 2090 in a world where more developed countries make erratic progress while poorer ones remain ill-suited for confronting the perils of climate change, still less ideal is our current path.
We call this scenario Business as Usual because the core assumption is that trends in emissions growth and energy use over the past decade are the most reliable predictor of future developments for our three country groups through to 2030. Thereafter, decarbonization accelerates gradually thanks to the greater availability of cost-effective low-carbon technologies. While this is certainly not a worst-case scenario, it perhaps best represents the trajectory the world is currently on.
Climate Catastrophe
Draw a line to predict the level of warming by 2090 in a grim, go-it-alone scenario where climate action falters and the world remains heavily reliant on fossil fuels, to devastating effect on crop yields, nutrition, and human mortality.
This scenario illustrates a future where the efforts made by many countries to rein in their emissions drops off significantly, possibly because of serious fragmentation of the world order and a rise in protectionism. The Paris Agreement and other mechanisms for engendering international cooperation and trade fall into abeyance.
For emerging and energy-poor countries, emissions growth continues at about 3% per annum until 2030, before falling to about 1% per annum for the rest of the century, implying strained economic growth and continued dependence on fossil fuels, especially coal. Globally, net-zero emissions is not achieved until 2250. In this scenario many developing countries remain energy-poor in the medium term, all the while experiencing increasingly devastating climate impacts.
All scenarios therefore surpassed the carbon budget implied by the 1.5°C trajectory, but only a scenario of immediate and sustained global collaboration would result in capping emissions below the 2°C target.
Assessing the Impact
We simulate the impacts of climate change on human welfare under the four scenarios outlined above. Using these parameters, future physical conditions are mapped under each pathway at a high geographic resolution through 2090. We then analyze how populations in each of the world’s countries respond to changing climate conditions in multiple time horizons, focusing on the impacts of heat on:
- Agriculture and food
- Health and mortality
- Energy consumption
What we therefore present below might best be considered a partial glimpse into the future offered by looking through a lens with a very narrow and tightly focused aperture. The reality, particularly in the more extreme scenarios, would likely be considerably worse as eroding living standards added to mass social unrest.
Agriculture and food
Even a “modest” rise in global average temperatures will result in broader changes to weather patterns. The impacts of falling yields due to heat will, by definition, be felt most acutely in areas already facing food insecurity. This puts Africa, which is home to 23 of the 25 most food-insecure countries in the world, in the crosshairs.
Use the drop-down list to look up a specific country’s projected annual yield change across all crops through 2090 under each of the four scenarios.
Health and mortality
As temperatures rise, the impacts will be felt in varying ways across different regions. The world’s energy-poor countries, which start, on average, with a warmer baseline temperature and with less access to the infrastructure, healthcare, and cooling that can mitigate the effects of heat waves, again suffer an outsized burden.
Use the drop-down list to look up a specific country’s projected mortality due to climate change in terms of annual deaths per 100,000 through 2090 under each of the four scenarios. A negative value means no additional deaths occurred in a particular period compared with the baseline period.
Energy consumption
The rising demand for electricity for cooling would have a material impact on power generation. Additional new large power plants will need to be built in the energy-poor countries just to meet the increasing demand linked to adapting to heat, without taking into account the additional capacity needed to address energy poverty.
Use the drop-down list to look up a specific country’s projected electricity demand in annual kWh per capita through 2090 under each of the four scenarios.
What we mean by energy-poor countries
Access to power has become central and indispensable to modern life: nothing is more predictive of extreme poverty than lack of access to electricity, and nothing does more to alleviate poverty than providing that access. For many of the world’s poor, the key impediment to their entry into a modern economy is the inability to plug into a reliable source of power.
For this reason, the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 7 calls for “access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all”. Yet the principal indicator of that goal is the residential electrification rate of a minimum of 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per capita per year.
This level of consumption is in no way sufficient to sustain economic development and to open the doors of economic opportunity to the citizens of energy-poor countries. For a country to reach lower middle-income status requires a Modern Energy Minimum (MEM) of about 1,000 kilowatt-hours per annum to be achieved. This is inclusive of both 300 kWh of household and 700 kWh of non-household electricity consumption.
Using this threshold as a proxy for energy poverty, we estimate that approximately 3.6 billion people live in energy poverty across 81 countries: 75 of these countries have not reached a MEM and another 6 have grids that are so unreliable that they constitute an impediment to development. This set of 3.6 billion people falls into three subsets:
- 0Million
people that have no electricity whatsoever, almost 609 million of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa
- 0Billion
people in addition who have unreliable or unstable access (and are also energy-poor)
- 0Billion
people approximately who have a reliable connection, but their level of power consumption remains a severe impediment to progress
- Report
Vulnerable Populations in a Warming World: Four Futures Explored
There is a clear path forward on the climate front that achieves rapid decarbonization combined with a swift scale-up in renewable energies. The strategy, laid out in this new Rockefeller Foundation analysis of data from 190 countries, can keep global warming to acceptable limits this century while sparking a revolution in energy access.Download PDF
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