Development and climate policy synergies: insights from global modelling studies

India's approach to climate policy is based on amplifying synergies between sustainable development ad climate outcomes, or co-benefits. However, the evidence base for the magnitude of these synergies remains limited. This brief summarizes the result of global models, which provide strong evidence of complementarities between climate mitigation outcomes, reduced air pollution and enhanced energy security. These results are robust across a wide range of models. They suggest there are considerable gains across multiple objectives of development policy from pursuing India's stated co-benefits approach to climate policy

India’s energy and emissions future: an interpretive analysis of model scenarios

As a significant emitter of greenhouse gases, but also as a developing country starting from a low emissions base, India is an important actor in global climate change mitigation. However, perceptions of India vary widely, from an energy-hungry climate deal-breaker to a forerunner of a low carbon future. Developing clarity on India's energy and emissions future is challenged by the uncertainties of India's development transitions, including its pathway through a demographic and urban transition within a rapidly changing policy context. Model-based scenario analyses provide widely varying projections, in part because they make differing assumptions, often implicit, about these transitions. To address the uncertainty in India's energy and emissions future, this Letter applies a novel interpretive approach to existing scenario studies. First, we make explicit the implied development, technology and policy assumptions underlying model-based analysis in order to cluster and interpret results. In a second step, we analyse India's current policy landscape and use that as a benchmark against which to judge scenario assumptions and results. Using this interpretive approach, we conclude that, based on current policies, a doubling of India's CO2 energy-related emissions from 2012 levels is a likely upper bound for its 2030 emissions and that this trajectory is consistent with meeting India's Paris emissions intensity pledge. Because of its low emissions starting point, even after a doubling, India's 2030 per capita emissions will be below today's global average and absolute emissions will be less than half of China's 2015 emissions from the same sources. The analysis of recent policy trends further suggests a lower than expected electricity demand and a faster than expected transition from coal to renewable electricity. The Letter concludes by making an argument for interpretive approaches as a necessary complement to scenario analysis, particularly in rapidly changing development contexts

Annex 1 - Glossary

This glossary defines some specific terms as the Lead Authors intend them to be interpreted in the context of this report

Chapter 15 - National and sub-national policies and institutions

This chapter assesses national and sub-national mitigation policies and their institutional settings. There has been a marked increase in national policies and legislation on climate change since the AR4 with a diversity of approaches and a multiplicity of objectives (see Section 15.2). However, Figure 1.9 of Chapter 1 suggests that these policies, taken together, have not yet achieved a substantial deviation in emissions from the past trend. Limiting concentrations to levels that would be consistent with a likely probability of maintaining temperature increases below 2 degrees C this century (scenarios generally in the range of 430-480 ppmv CO2eq) would require that emissions break from these trends and be decreased substantially. In contrast, concentrations exceed 1000 ppmv CO2eq by 2100 in many baseline scenarios (that is, scenarios without additional efforts to reduce emissions). The literature on mitigation scenarios provides a wide range of CO2 shadow price levels consistent with these goals, with estimates of less than US$50/tCO2 in 2020 in many studies and exceeding US$100/tCO2 in others, assuming a globally-efficient and immediate effort to reduce emissions. These shadow prices exhibit a strongly increasing trend thereafter. Policies and instruments are assessed in this light. Section 15.2 assesses the role of institutions and governance. Section 15.3 lays out the classification of policy instruments and packages, while 15.4 discusses the methodologies used to evaluate policies and institutions. The performance of various policy instruments and measures are individually assessed in Sections 15.5 and 15.6. The two main types of economic instruments are price instruments, that is, taxes and subsidies (including removal of subsidies on fossil fuels), and quantity instruments - emission-trading systems. These are assessed in Sections 15.5.2 and 15.5.3 respectively. An important feature of both these instruments is that they can be applied at a very broad, economy-wide scale. This is in contrast to the regulation and information policies and voluntary agreements which are usually sector- specific. These policies are assessed in Sections 15.5.4, 15.5.5, and 15.5.7. Government provision and planning is discussed in 15.5.6. The next section, 15.6, provides a focused discussion on technology policy including research and development and the deployment and diffusion of clean energy technologies. In addition to technology policy, longer-term effects of the policies assessed in Section 15.5 are addressed in Section 15.6. Both these sections, 15.5 and 15.6, bring together lessons from policies and policy packages used at the sectoral level from Chapters 7 (Energy), 8 (Transport), 9 (Buildings), 10 (Industry), 11 (Agriculture, Forestry and Land Use) and Chapter 12 (Human Settlements, Infrastructure, and Spatial Planning). The following sections further assess the interaction among policy instruments, as they are not usually used in isolation, and the impacts of particular instruments depend on the entire package of policies and the institutional context. Section 15.7 reviews interactions, both beneficial and harmful, that may not have been planned. The presence of such interactions is in part a consequence of the multi-jurisdictional nature of climate governance as well as the use of multiple policy instruments within a jurisdiction. Section 15.8 examines the deliberate linkage of policies across national and sub-national jurisdictions. Other key issues are further discussed in dedicated sections. They are: the role of stakeholders including non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (15.9), capacity building (15.10), links between adaptation and mitigation policies (15.11), and investment and finance (15.12). Gaps in knowledge are collected in 15.13

Emissions: world has four times the work or one-third of the time

The past decade of political failure on climate change has cost us all dear. It has shrunk the time left for action by two-thirds. In 2010, the world thought it had 30 years to halve global emissions of greenhouse gases. Today, we know that this must happen in ten years to minimize the effects of climate change. Incremental shifts that might once have been sufficient are no longer enough

Summary for policymakers

The Working Group III contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (WGIII AR5) provides a comprehensive assessment of all relevant options for mitigating climate change through limiting or preventing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as activities that remove them from the atmosphere. It draws on scientific literature accepted for publication prior to 4 October 2013. The WGIII Summary for Policymakers was approved at the Twelfth Session of Working Group III, held in Berlin, Germany, from 7 to 11 April, 2014. During the session, the IPCC plenary also accepted the underlying scientific and technical assessment, which stands at 2000 pages, including more than 700 pages of references

Technical summary

The Working Group III (WGIII) contribution to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) assesses literature on the scientific, technological, environmental, economic and social aspects of mitigation of climate change. It builds upon the WGIII contribution to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN) and previous reports and incorporates subsequent new findings and research. Throughout, the focus is on the implications of its findings for policy, without being prescriptive about the particular policies that governments and other important participants in the policy process should adopt. In light of the IPCC's mandate, authors in WGIII were guided by several principles when assembling this assessment: (1) to be explicit about mitigation options, (2) to be explicit about their costs and about their risks and opportunities vis-a-vis other development priorities, (3) and to be explicit about the underlying criteria, concepts, and methods for evaluating alternative policies. This summary offers the main findings of the report