Emissions Lock-in, Capacity, and Public Opinion: How Insights From Political Science Can Inform Climate Modeling Efforts

The implementation of ambitious climate policies consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement is fundamentally influenced by political dynamics. Yet, thus far, climate mitigation pathways developed by integrated assessment models (IAMs) have devoted limited attention to the political drivers of climate policymaking. Bringing together insights from the political science and socio-technical transitions literature, we summarize evidence on how emissions lock-in, capacity, and public opinion can shape climate policy ambition. We employ a set of indicators to describe how these three factors vary across countries and regions, highlighting context-specific challenges and enablers of climate policy ambition. We outline existing studies that incorporate political factors in IAMs and propose a framework to employ empirical data to build climate mitigation scenarios that incorporate political dynamics. Our findings show that there is substantial heterogeneity in key political drivers of climate policy ambition within IAM regions, calling for a more disaggregated regional grouping within models. Importantly, we highlight that the political challenges and enablers of climate policy ambition considerably vary across regions, suggesting that future modeling efforts incorporating political dynamics can significantly increase the realism of IAM scenarios

Why Ambitious and Just Climate Mitigation Needs Political Science

A large-scale transformation of the energy system, which climate mitigation entails, is a global and highly politicized problem. This thematic issue brings together scholars who work with Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs)—which are used for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports and other key analyses of future climate trajectories—and social scientists working on climate and energy issues to highlight how the two strands of research could benefit from combining insights across different disciplines and methods. One of the key messages across almost all contributions is that the more technical perspectives could benefit from adjusting their assumptions to reflect the patterns observed in quantitative and qualitative social science. Combining different disciplines is methodologically challenging but promising to ensure that the mitigation strategies developed are considered technically and politically feasible, as well as just

Exploring Enablers for an Ambitious Coal Phaseout

To reach the mitigation goals of the Paris Agreement, many countries will have to phase out their coal power plants prematurely, i.e., before the end of their normal lifetimes, which will lead quite possibly to significant stranded assets. This could present a major challenge, particularly for many of the rapidly developing countries whose electricity demand is growing and which are currently expanding their coal fleets. Recent research shows that countries with aging power plants and decreasing coal consumption are more inclined to phase out coal, but little is known about where, why, and how coal power plants are being prematurely retired. In the context of the hybrid Paris Agreement, attention is increasingly shifting to domestic mitigation capacities and, alongside this—given the vested interests involved in different sectors—to state capacity to implement the transformations required to achieve deep decarbonization. In this article, we aim to study those capacities in the context of coal phaseout. We use a recent and comprehensive global dataset on coal power plants and employ a mixed-methods research design to (a) identify general emerging patterns with respect to premature coal fleet retirement, and (b) derive stylized types of political strategies to prematurely retire coal power plants. We find state capacity to be a robust predictor of general and premature coal retirement, and we identify three main strategies that countries have used to date to prematurely retire coal: (a) rein-in using top-down regulatory enforcement of environmental, climate, or other regulations that affect the operating licenses of coal plants; (b) buy-out or provision of compensation to companies and regions to appease vested interests; and (c) crowd out where accelerating market and price dynamics in the power sector crowd out coal. We propose that future research should explore more systematically the kinds of strategy that might be most promising in the regions and countries needing to rapidly phase out coal, taking into account their political structures, and also the implications that such strategies might have for global mitigation efforts

Faster or slower decarbonization? Policymaker and stakeholder expectations on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global energy transition

The COVID-19 pandemic might have tremendous consequences on decarbonization efforts across the globe. Understanding governments’ policy action in the short and medium term is key to assess whether the response to the crisis will crowd out or fast-track decarbonization efforts. We surveyed over 200 policymakers and stakeholders from 55 different countries to collect climate policy expectations in various sectors and regions in the next five years. While support for high-emitting sectors is not expected to dissolve completely, commitment to policies supporting the transition to low-carbon energy and transport sectors is expected to increase substantially. This is true for OECD and Asian countries, representing approximately 90% of global emissions. Our results suggest that expectations that the COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate decarbonization efforts are widely shared

Feasible futures

Embracing the notion of feasibility, this research shows that the world will probably overshoot 1.5°C, largely owing to low institutional capacity. Energy demand reduction and electrification are two options to turn down the heat, and addressing weak institutions is crucial. In the past, climate scenarios have focused on how to curb warming for the lowest economic cost. But cost is only one factor in the overall feasibility of climate mitigation. New research accounts for other dimensions of feasibility, encompassing technology, natural resources, and the capacity of governments to implement mitigation

Exploring Global Climate Policy Futures and Their Representation in Integrated Assessment Models

The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, paved the way for a new hybrid global climate governance architecture with both bottom‐up and top‐down elements. While governments can choose individual climate goals and actions, a global stocktake and a ratcheting‐up mechanism have been put in place with the overall aim to ensure that collective efforts will prevent increasing adverse impacts of climate change. Integrated assessment models show that current combined climate commitments and policies of national governments fall short of keeping global warming to 1.5 °C or 2 °C above preindustrial levels. Although major greenhouse gas emitters, such as China, the European Union, India, the United States under the Biden administration, and several other countries, have made new pledges to take more ambitious climate action, it is highly uncertain where global climate policy is heading. Scenarios in line with long‐term temperature targets typically assume a simplistic and hardly realistic level of harmonization of climate policies across countries. Against this backdrop, this article develops four archetypes for the further evolution of the global climate governance architecture and matches them with existing sets of scenarios developed by integrated assessment models. By these means, the article identifies knowledge gaps in the current scenario literature and discusses possible research avenues to explore the pre‐conditions for successful coordination of national policies towards achieving the long‐term target stipulated in the Paris Agreement

A multidimensional feasibility evaluation of low-carbon scenarios

Long-term mitigation scenarios developed by integrated assessment models underpin major aspects of recent IPCC reports and have been critical to identify the system transformations that are required to meet stringent climate goals. However, they have been criticized for proposing pathways that may prove challenging to implement in the real world and for failing to capture the social and institutional challenges of the transition. There is a growing interest to assess the feasibility of these scenarios, but past research has mostly focused on theoretical considerations. This paper proposes a novel and versatile multidimensional framework that allows evaluating and comparing decarbonization pathways by systematically quantifying feasibility concerns across geophysical, technological, economic, socio-cultural and institutional dimensions. This framework enables to assess the timing, disruptiveness and scale of feasibility concerns, and to identify trade-offs across different feasibility dimensions. As a first implementation of the proposed framework, we map the feasibility concerns of the IPCC 1.5 °C Special Report scenarios. We select 24 quantitative indicators and propose feasibility thresholds based on insights from an extensive analysis of the literature and empirical data. Our framework is, however, flexible and allows evaluations based on different thresholds or aggregation rules. Our analyses show that institutional constraints, which are often not accounted for in scenarios, are key drivers of feasibility concerns. Moreover, we identify a clear intertemporal trade-off, with early mitigation being more disruptive but preventing higher and persistent feasibility concerns produced by postponed mitigation action later in the century

Taking stock of carbon dioxide removal policy in emerging economies: developments in Brazil, China, and India

Deliberately removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is an important element of bringing mitigation pathways in line with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. To reach global net-zero CO2 emissions and limit global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot, global mitigation pathways assessed by IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report require some world regions to achieve net-negative CO2 emissions with large-scale carbon dioxide removal (CDR) deployment. This raises important questions about the availability and feasibility of CDR deployment in different societal and political contexts. This paper therefore combines an analysis of CDR deployment in a sample of scenarios from the IPCC AR6 database with a bottom-up analysis of the state of CDR governance and policy in countries considered key in scaling up CDR capacity and not yet covered by existing research. In particular, the paper focuses on Brazil, China, and India as important emerging economies and large emitters. We highlight the expected use of CDR methods in those regions in scenarios and systematically assess and compare the level of CDR regulation and innovation across these countries. This comparative perspective has the potential to broaden the understanding of existing and emerging CDR policies and politics. The synthesis of the case studies provides three key contributions to existing literature: First, we explore the state of CDR governance and policymaking in key emerging economies. As in OECD countries, there is a notable lack of CDR regulation and innovation to enable the scale of CDR required in the short- and medium term. Second, we identify that repurposing policies is a key type of emerging CDR policymaking in these countries targeting CDR methods in the land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector. We find that the repurposing efforts strengthen the level of regulation and innovation for this group of methods. Third, we explore three building blocks (regional differentiation, delay of upscaling, sustainability thresholds) of plausible CDR deployment narratives that could help bridge integrated assessment models and comparative case studies in future research