Short term policies to keep the door open for Paris climate goals
2018
Kriegler, Elmar | Bertram, Christoph | Kuramochi, Takeshi | Jakob, Michael | Pehl, Michaja | Stevanović, Miodrag | Höhne, Niklas | Luderer, Gunnar | Minx, Jan C. | Fekete, Hanna | Hilaire, Jérôme | Luna, Lisa | Popp, Alexander | Steckel, Jan Christoph | Sterl, Sebastian | Yalew, Amsalu Woldie | Dietrich, Jan Philipp | Edenhofer, Ottmar
Climate policy needs to account for political and social acceptance. Current national climate policy plans proposed under the Paris Agreement lead to higher emissions until 2030 than cost-effective pathways towards the Agreements' long-term temperature goals would imply. Therefore, the current plans would require highly disruptive changes, prohibitive transition speeds, and large long-term deployment of risky mitigation measures for achieving the agreement's temperature goals after 2030. Since the prospects of introducing the cost-effective policy instrument, a global comprehensive carbon price in the near-term, are negligible, we study how a strengthening of existing plans by a global roll-out of regional policies can ease the implementation challenge of reaching the Paris temperature goals. The regional policies comprise a bundle of regulatory policies in energy supply, transport, buildings, industry, and land use and moderate, regionally differentiated carbon pricing. We find that a global roll-out of these policies could reduce global CO<sub>2</sub> emissions by an additional 10 GtCO<sub>2</sub>eq in 2030 compared to current plans. It would lead to emissions pathways close to the levels of cost-effective likely below 2<sup>◦</sup>C scenarios until 2030, thereby reducing implementation challenges post 2030. Even though a gradual phase-in of a portfolio of regulatory policies might be less disruptive than immediate cost-effective carbon pricing, it would perform worse in other dimensions. In particular, it leads to higher economic impacts that could become major obstacles in the long-term. Hence, such policy packages should not be viewed as alternatives to carbon pricing, but rather as complements that provide entry points to achieve the Paris climate goals.
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