The WWF report, Vision for 2050 seeks to answer the question: “Is it technically possible to meet the growing global demand for energy by using clean and sustainable energy sources and technologies that will protect the global climate?” In other words, can a concerted shift to the sustainable energy resources and technologies that are available today meet the more than doubling of global energy demand projected by 2050, while avoiding dangerous climatic change of more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels?
The report's conclusion is that the technologies and sustainable energy resources known or available today are sufficient to meet this challenge, and there is still sufficient time to build up and deploy them, but only if the necessary decisions are made in the next five years. Yet it is clear that the economic policies and governmental interventions needed to propel this transition are not now in place, or even in prospect in most cases. This is a matter to which the world needs to give urgent attention.
WWF is acutely aware that many of the steps considered in this report – an end to the dominance of fossil energy, a phase-out of nuclear power, a rapid expansion of biomass energy – carry with them social, environmental, and economic consequences that must be carefully weighed and closely managed. To take a single example, even the limited shift to energy crops today threatens accelerated conversion of wild habitats and further deprivation of the world’s poor by driving up food prices. A global energy transition must be managed to reflect the differing priorities and interests of the world community at large.
Halting climate change is a long-term undertaking, but the first steps must be taken by governments currently in power. The future depends on them making critical decisions soon which could lead to a low-emission global energy economy in a timescale consistent with saving the climate, and planning for the social and economic dimensions of that transition to minimize the negative impacts of such urgent change.
The WWF Global Energy Task Force In 2006, WWF convened a Global Energy Task Force to develop an integrated vision on energy for 2050. The Task Force explored the potential for successful achievement of the following goal for energy policy: to meet the projected global growth in demand for energy services while avoiding the most dangerous impacts of climate change, but using energy sources that are socially and environmentally benign.
The time-sensitive approach taken here differs from other studies in a number of ways. It draws on authoritative sources for projections of energy demand and climate change trends, uses WWF expertise to estimate the sustainable limits of technologies and resources, and assesses a wide range of published data on the potential rate of development and deployment of these technologies and systems. Finally, it exposes this information to analysis in a model which assesses the feasibility of successful delivery of the goal described above. A scenario showing high success potential is illustrated in this paper.
The task force began by reviewing 25 different low-carbon energy technologies, broadly construed: these included renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power; demand-side options such as efficient buildings and vehicles and reduced travel; and other low-carbon technologies such as “carbon capture and storage” and nuclear power. The sole constraint was that technologies be “proven”, by virtue of being commercially available already. Each of the energy sources was then sorted and ranked based on its environmental impacts, social acceptability, and economic costs. This ranking exercise yielded three groupings of technologies: those with clear positive benefits beyond the ability to reduce carbon intensity (efficiency technologies dominate this group); those with some negative impacts but which remain on balance positive; and those whose negative impacts clearly outweigh the positive.
The WWF Climate Solutions Model
The technology groups whose benefits were found to outweigh their negative impacts were then run through a newly designed WWF Climate Solutions Model. This model was designed to determine the industrial feasibility of developing and deploying these resources and technologies in a timeframe that can avert dangerous climate change over the period to 2050, and at levels that can accommodate the projected increase in global demand for energy. It bears emphasis that the WWF Climate Solutions Model is not an economic model: no price for carbon was set, nor were the costs of the technologies assigned or modelled. Economic scenarios have been explored by others, including Stern and McKinsey, noting that costs of dangerous climate change are far in excess of the costs of avoiding it. Likewise, no assumptions have been incorporated about the policies or measures needed to drive a transition to the sustainable energy technologies in the model. Rather, the model seeks to answer only the narrow question whether, given what is known about physical resources, the capacity of the technologies themselves and the rate of industrial transitions, it is feasible to deploy the needed technologies in time to avert dangerous climatic change.
Findings and Conclusions
On this all-important point, the WWF Climate Solutions Model offers a qualified basis for hope: it indicates that with a high degree of probability (i.e. greater than 90%), the known sustainable energy sources and proven technologies could be harnessed between now and 2050 to meet a projected doubling of global demand for energy services, while achieving the significant (in the order of 60%-80%) reductions in climate-threatening emissions, enabling a long-term stabilization of concentrations at 400ppm (parts per million) – though concentrations in the short term will peak at a higher level before being absorbed by oceans and the biosphere. A solution, in other words, is at least possible.
However, from this threshold determination of technological feasibility, the outlook immediately becomes more complex and ominous. The economic policies and measures, as well as the intergovernmental actions, needed to drive this transition are not yet in place, and may well be years away based on current progress. And with real-world constraints on the speed of industrial transition, analysed in our model, it is clear that time is now of the essence. In five years it may be too late to initiate a sustainable transition which could avert a breach of the two degree threshold for avoiding dangerous climate change. In that event, dangerously unsustainable options may be forced upon us or we will face more severe interventions which will have significant impacts on the global economy.
Solutions
The WWF report identifies the following six solutions and three imperatives as key to achieving the goal of meeting global energy demand without damaging the global climate:
1.Breaking the Link between Energy Services and Primary Energy Production — Energy efficiency (getting more energy services per unit of energy used) is a priority, especially in developed countries which have a very inefficient capital stock. The model shows that by 2020-2025, energy efficiencies will make it possible to meet increasing demand for energy services within a stable net demand for primary energy production, reducing projected demand by 39% annually, and avoiding emissions of 9.4Gt carbon per year, by 2050.
2.Stopping Forest Loss — Stopping and reversing loss and degradation of forests, particularly in the tropics, is a crucial element of any positive climate-energy scenario. The probability of success of the climate solutions proposed here drops progressively from greater than 90% down to 35% in the absence of effective action to curb land-use emissions.
3.Concurrent growth of Low-Emissions Technologies — The rapid and parallel pursuit of the full range of technologies, such as wind, hydro, solar PV & thermal, and bio-energy is crucial, but within a set of environmental and social constraints to ensure their sustainability. By 2050, these technologies could meet 70% of the remaining demand after efficiencies have been applied, avoiding a further 10.2Gt carbon emissions annually.
4.Developing Flexible Fuels, Energy Storage and New Infrastructure — Deep cuts in fossil-fuel use cannot be achieved without large volumes of energy from intermittent sources, like wind and solar, being stored and transformed into transportable fuels and into fuels to meet the thermal needs of industry. New fuels, such as hydrogen, that meet these requirements will require major new infrastructure for their production and distribution.
5.Displacing High-Carbon Coal with Low-Carbon Gas — Natural gas as a “bridging fuel” offers an important opportunity to avoid the long-term lock-in of new coal power stations, providing significant carbon savings in the near term, while other energy sources and technologies are grown from a smaller industrial base.
6.Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) — The model shows that, in order to stay within the carbon emissions budget, it is essential that fossil-fuel plants are equipped with carbon capture and storage technology as soon as possible – all by 2050. This has major and immediate implications for the planning and location of new plants, since transport of carbon dioxide to distant storage sites would be very costly. Overall, fossil fuels with CCS could account for 26% of supply in 2050, avoiding emissions of 3.8Gt C/yr.
Additional Imperatives
1.Urgency — Delays will make the transition to a low-carbon economy increasingly expensive and difficult, with much greater risks of failure. The case for early, decisive action is overwhelming.
2.A global effort — Every country has a role to play in response to the scale and the type of challenges arising in its territory.
3.Leadership — Action is needed by governments of the world to agree targets, to collaborate on effective strategies, and to influence and coordinate the investment of the many trillions of dollars which, in any event, will be spent on energy developments in the coming decades, so that future needs are met safely and sustainably.
Technologies and sustainable energy resources known or available today are sufficient to meet the growing demand for energy, and protect the world from dangerous climatic change. However, the first steps must be taken by governments currently in power. The future depends on them making critical decisions in the next five years.
