Page - 8 - in options, Volume winter 2014/2015

science into policy 8 options + winter 2014/2015 www.iiasa.ac.at iiasa research T he AMPERE project, a collaborative effort among 22  institutions in Europe, Asia, and North America led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research, was dedicated to the “Assessment of Climate Change Mitigation Pathways and Evaluation of the Robustness of Mitigation Cost Estimates.” AMPERE scientists have been identifying strategies for cutting greenhouse gas emissions—strategies known as “mitigation pathways” and assessing whether these strategies prove practical and economically viable. In particular, IIASA  researchers have led and coordinated the efforts to investigate the costs and risks of delaying such mitigation strategies. “The goal was to better understand implications of short term actions on the long term costs and ability of reaching low stabilization targets,” says IIASA Energy Program Director Keywan  Riahi, who led and coordinated the IIASA AMPERE efforts. “This  effective linking of short term action to mitigation risks has not been done before.” Comparing the results from 11 models, the scientists found that delays in implementing the necessary policies to limit warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels will limit the possible mitigation options for the future. “Mitigation will become more difficult and, in some cases, even infeasible,” Riahi says. The researchers found that if current policies remain unchanged before 2030, meeting the target would require drastically steep emission cuts between 2030 and 2050. Achieving such cuts would involve unprecedented policy interventions and would require replacement of more than half the global energy supply infrastructure within the narrow 20-year period. The findings also revealed that such extreme cuts would spell bad news for coal power plant owners. Currently, countries are still building new coal power plants—plants that only pay off their investment after 30–50 years of operations. Stricter emissions policies would mean that coal power would no longer prove competitive with cleaner fuel sources, and the plants would have  to shut down before the investment in them was repaid. “These power plants become stranded assets because you need to prematurely shut them down, so investments in the order of hundreds of billions of US dollars, mostly in China and India, are pumped into the wrong choices and large portions of these investments are ultimately lost,” says IIASA researcher Nils Johnson, the lead author of the analysis of stranded investments, which used IIASA’s integrated assessment model MESSAGE. Such key AMPERE research studies have provided the backbone of the analysis of delayed mitigation for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Riahi says. Because of the policy relevance of the science, it was picked up and included in the 2014 White House Report The  Cost of Delaying Action to Stem Climate Change. The robustness and thoroughness of the research was directly due to the combined power of multiple models from different institutes, Riahi says. “The project has been very successful,” he  says, “and the high policy relevance of this research was a result of the coordinated joint effort of the international research teams.” JP Further info Johnson N, Krey V, McCollum DL, Rao S, Riahi K, Rogelj J. Stranded  on a low-carbon planet: Implications of climate policy for the phase-out of  coal-based power plants. Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Published online 29 March 2014) [doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2014.02.028]. Keywan Riahi riahi@iiasa.ac.at § Nils Johnson johnsonn@iiasa.ac.at The costs of delaying action on climate change In January 2014 the AMPERE conference celebrated the end of three years of  effective research using leading edge models to explore economically practical strategies to lessen the impact of climate change. The project’s researchers, including many from IIASA, presented their results to more than 200 stakeholders in Brussels—findings which have directly informed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) and a White House Report published in July 2014.