Insight on IPCC’s Climate Mitigation Report

(MainsGS 3 : Conservation, Environmental Pollution and Degradation, Environmental Impact Assessment.)

Context:

• Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, titled ‘Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change’ was released.
• The report paints a broad picture of the progress made in achieving climate mitigation targets and presents a comprehensive discussion on the effectiveness of and challenges confronting the climate mitigation enterprise.

Closing window of opportunity:

• Despite the growing consensus that the window of opportunity to fight climate change is fast closing, the recent decade of 2010–2019 registered the highest Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in human history.
• Even the updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are expected to fall short of what is required to bend the temperature curve to 1.5°Celsius. 
• Although executing these updated NDCs would lead to decline in GHG emissions, the global emissions by 2030 implicated by such execution would breach pathways compatible with 1.5°Celsius by a large margin.

Pursuit of happiness:

• The 2010–2019 decade recorded the highest average annual emission levels for all GHG gases.
• At the global level, GDP per capita and population growth have been identified as the main sources of CO₂ emissions resulting from fossil fuel combustion in 2010–2019.
• Increase in aggregate demand following population growth and the need to increase incomes, achieving a decent standard of living and pursuit of untenable prosperity are driving the main culprit of climate change i.e. CO₂ emissions.
• However, from the perspective of a sustainable lifestyle, the emissions generated by the consumption patterns of those belonging to the middle and the poorest income groups in emerging economies is 5–15 times lower than those belonging to the same group in the high-income countries.

Demand-based strategies:

• The inequality in the distribution of carbon budget reinforces the need to focus upon SDG 12 of responsible consumption and production, more so, for the developed countries. 
• The IPCC report identifies ways in which this SDG can be achieved, referred to as demand-side mitigation options. 
• Examples of such strategies include avoiding air travel, adopting low carbon mobility options such as walking, cycling, electric mobility and public transit, shifting to plant-based diets, and increasing uptake of energy efficient end-use technologies in the context of buildings. 
• Such demand-based strategies hold the potential of reducing GHG emissions by 40–70 percent by 2050.

Demands immediate action:

• A key takeaway of the IPCC report is that while bending the temperature curve to 1.5 degrees Celsius is very difficult, it is possible. 
• It demands immediate action which implies that nations including India will have to revisit their NDCs and net-zero targets if the globe is to peak before 2025, nearly halve the GHG emissions by 2030, and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. 
• This is going to be extremely challenging for a nation like India which requires to increase its per capita GDP and will witness population growth till 2050, both strong drivers of CO₂ emissions.

Drivers of CO₂ emissions:

• Pursuit of per capita GDP and population growth not only driving CO₂ emissions, they are responsible for increasing emissions by 2.3 percent and 1.2 percent annually respectively. 
• This increase is greater than the decline registered in the energy intensity of GDP which stood at -2 percent per annum and in the carbon intensity of energy which stood at -0.3 percent per annum. 
• Efforts at resource and energy efficiencies, low carbonisation and decarbonisation are being overridden by the forces of global aggregate demand leading to resultant increase in GHG emissions.

Favourable policies:  

• The report acknowledges that while technologies for enabling low to zero emissions in all industry sectors do exist, leveraging them for cost and emission reductions demands ‘5 -15 years of intensive innovation, commercialisation and policy.’ 
• This can boost the scaling up of interventions required to reduce the emissions intensity of the primary production and reduce the need for primary production itself. 
• This will nevertheless significantly raise production costs of basic materials like steel, cement, plastic, pulp and paper, and chemicals.
• Here, the government can play an important role in encouraging R&D, providing tax concessions and production linked incentives to support production and commercialisation of these technologies and interventions.
• Governments further formulate other favourable policies that will help the producers and adopters of these technologies and interventions to thrive in the market.

Conclusion:

• The recently released IPCC report highlights the measures that need to be undertaken to achieve climate mitigation targets and the obstacles that will surface in trying to achieve the same.
• Further, the report put the general spotlight in terms of GHG emissions on the energy sector but the net-zero targets necessitate that some of this spotlight be shifted to industrial emissions.