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News in brief WILL FORESTS LET US DOWN? DIRTY GENERATORS — BIG FOOTPRINT DEALING WITH UNCERTAINTY Current climate models assume that forests will continue to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at their current rate. A study by an international team including researchers from IIASA, however, indicates that this uptake capacity could be strongly limited by soil phosphorus availability. If this scenario proves true, the Earth’s climate would heat up much faster than previously assumed. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/CO2- Fertilization-19 A recently released report shows that fossil fuel-burning backup generators in developing countries produce as much energy as 700-1,000 coal-fired power stations, consume US$50 billion in annual spending, and emit dangerous chemicals into homes and businesses. IIASA researchers contributed to the report, which calls for rapid adoption of clean alternatives to fossil fuel generators. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/backup- generators-19 Estimates of greenhouse gas emissions are inherently uncertain, and reducing uncertainty can be costly, time-consuming, or downright impossible. In a recent volume that included IIASA research, 13 papers explored the issue in depth and made recommendations on how to deal with it. The authors say that dealing with uncertainty involves a commitment that is painstaking and long-term. www.iiasa.ac.at/news/Emissions- uncertainty-19 Scenario logic for climate policy Climate scientists have long used scenarios as a way to explore what could happen in the future depending on what actions people take today. Scenarios are essentially narratives about the future that allow scientists to quantify and analyze factors that are difficult to pin down unambiguously, such as societal choices that influence the interconnected energy–economy– environment system. The resulting information is commonly used by policymakers to inform climate policy decisions such as the measures that could allow us to limit global warming to well-below 2°C or even 1.5°C relative to preindustrial levels, as stipulated in the Paris Agreement. IIASA research published in the journal Nature has however identified a flaw in the design logic used to build these climate scenarios. Because they focus on achieving specific goals by 2100 only, the resulting scenarios ignore near-term climate change impacts, and have to rely on risky global-scale CO2 removal measures after mid-century to make up for shortfalls in near-term climate action. The study proposes a new scenario framework that resolves this issue by allowing researchers to address these questions of intergenerational fairness and risk explicitly in their research design. “Once we became aware that virtually all scenarios that are used to inform climate policy are biased towards risky pathways that for no good reason put a disproportionately large burden on younger generations, we started looking for a new logic that could resolve the issue. We were looking for a new way of designing long-term climate change mitigation scenarios that are more closely aligned with the intentions of the Paris Agreement,” explains lead author Joeri Rogelj, researcher with the IIASA Energy Program and a lecturer at Imperial College London. © Marcin Wojciechowski | Dreamstime.com Joeri Rogelj: rogelj@iiasa.ac.atFurther info: pure.iiasa.ac.at/16075 5Optionswww.iiasa.ac.at Winter 2019/20