A report published on Thursday, September 13, 2018 shows the potential for all sectors of global economy – energy, food and agriculture, industry, buildings and transport – to halve greenhouse gas emissions by around 2030. Stronger policies, the digital revolution and greater climate leadership are necessary to accelerate the economic transformation, say the authors.

The report, launched by Christiana Figueres and global sustainability researcher Johan Rockström, to open the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, concludes that the energy transformation in the next decade could occur much faster than many forecasts as the price of renewables drops low enough to outcompete fossil fuels. But keeping up the pace will require sharper policies to push out fossil fuels. Other sectors, however, are off track.

The digital revolution remains a wildcard, says the report. Technology can directly influence 30% of the emissions cuts needed by about 2030, and indirectly affect the rest through influencing consumer habits, scaling up a sharing economy and supporting business transformation to a circular economy.

Greenhouse gas emissions must fall sharply to stabilise climate well below 2°C and aim for 1.5°C as agreed by nations in Paris in 2015. Emissions peaking in 2020 and approximately halving by about 2030 is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s aim.

“Right now, it is easier to imagine a global climate catastrophe than a rapid economic transformation, yet the next decade could see the fastest energy transition in history,” says co-lead author Owen Gaffney from Future Earth and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

“People underestimate the power of exponential growth. In Norway, electric cars went from 6% of new sales to 47% in five years. If renewables keep doubling every five or six years, as they have for a decade or more, they will push out fossil fuels much faster than most forecasts. But not without stronger policies,” he added.

The authors argue that the digital revolution is already driving an economic transformation.

“How this revolution is directed could make or break international climate targets. The tech sector can influence whether we live on a 1.5-2°C planet or on a +3°C world,” says Johan Falk co-lead author from Future Earth and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

“Technology will not solve the climate challenge alone. The key is to reach a critical mass of companies, cities, nations, industries and citizens that are contributing to the Paris Agreement and show how attractive this is – this will create the snowball effect we need to scale solutions”, says Falk.

The roadmap identifies the accelerators in terms of climate leadership, policy and technology required to scale 30 solutions and concludes that a set of game-changing strategies in the next 18 months are needed to keep up an appropriately fast pace.

These strategies include:

• Accelerate climate leadership initiatives exponentially among companies, cities, industries and individuals to reach a critical mass with goals and actions to halve emissions fast.
• Create task forces to build momentum to end fossil-fuel subsidies, build out carbon pricing and wide-scale adoption of circular-economy approaches, as part of a broader goal to have coherent policies to shift away from fossil fuels.
• Launch global tech initiatives, or “accelerators” to align the Fourth Industrial Revolution (digitalisation, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, internet of things, etc) with the goal to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 – specifically to explore how tech giants can use their influence to support societal goals.

The report highlights that many companies can cut their own emissions faster than 50% every decade – and influence their suppliers to do the same. The next frontier is how companies can influence the consumers of their products and services to support low-carbon operations and lifestyles.

“To win the fight against climate change, we need to constantly push beyond what conventional wisdom tells us is possible. The digital revolution is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. Now, to realise the full potential, we need leadership and action: by policy makers, business leaders and all of us,” says Mikko Kosonen, President of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra who produced the report together with Future Earth with WWF, Ericsson and Stockholm Resilience Centre and others.

“Disruption is here. Three unstoppable forces are pushing us towards a future of prosperity, growth and clean energy: climate leadership, market forces and the digital revolution,” says former UN climate head Christiana Figueres, convenor of Mission 2020, a partner in the report.

The report launch comes after months of unprecedented heat waves, droughts and flooding across the planet that have been linked to human-induced climate change that show even moderate warming can cause global-scale disruption. New research published in August 2018 shows the risks of crossing the 2°C threshold could be more severe than scientists previously realised.

The roadmap will be available as a ready-to-use digital dashboard. It is intended to be used in the future by companies, cities and countries to align their efforts with the Paris climate targets. The dashboard has been developed for the Swedish government to support its stated ambition to become carbon neutral by 2045.

“As a sustainability pioneer in the private-sector, we have been both an advocate of climate action and investing in research and development of climate solutions. We understand the urgency for action. We believe leveraging new technology, such as digitalisation and 5G, will be fundamental to reduce carbon emissions by half every decade, meeting the Carbon Law. As a company, we have cut our own emissions by 50% and are working to meet further reduction targets. We have demonstrated solutions that help make it possible and now other companies and policy-makers must join the quest for broader adoption of solutions to enable exponential reduction of carbon emissions globally,” says Börje Ekholm, CEO, Ericsson.

“Leaders from cities, investors and corporates are forming alliances for climate action to inspire governments and peers to step up their efforts to reduce emissions. These include setting ambitious targets based on science, implementing these through increased entrepreneurship, and accelerating high impact innovation. We must do this if we are to have a future where people can live in harmony with nature,” notes Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, leader of WWF’s global climate and energy programme.

“The world has crossed a Rubicon where incremental change is no longer adequate to address climate change. Fortunately, research and innovation have given us what we need – save time – to tackle the climate crisis. This roadmap shows how business, politicians and civic groups can leverage this knowledge to scale up progress exponentially. We’ve got the knowledge and the tools. And we increasingly, we have the economics behind us. Now we just need the drive to accelerate forward,” notes Amy Luers, Executive Director, Future Earth.

“The world is at a critical juncture and the stakes could not be higher. Greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2020 and then fall dramatically – approximately halving every decade to reach the Paris Agreement’s terms. The consequences of missing this goal are potentially catastrophic for humanity. Yet all solutions exist to begin halving emissions immediately. Now is the moment to move from incremental to exponential action,” stresses Johan Rockström, Stockholm Resilience Centre, co-chair Future Earth, incoming co-director Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

The report is a collaboration between Future Earth, the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Mission 2020, WWF, Ericsson, Internet of Planet and supporting partners Telia Company, Project Drawdown, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Fossil-free Sweden, MapLauncher, Swedish Energy Agency and Storythings. It supports the Step Up Declaration being launched at the summit and Entrepreneurs Declaration launched in advance of the summit.

The roadmap is based on the Carbon Law – a scientific paper published in 2017 that shows that halving carbon dioxide emissions every decade to 2050 is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s aim to keep global average temperatures well below +2°C and aim for +1.5°C. An international team of experts from research, technology, and NGOs synthesised over 60 reports and academic analyses assessing scenarios related to very low greenhouse gas emissions.

A new accounting of global climate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions finds a broad spectrum of commitments from non-state and subnational actors with potential to support and ultimately outpace governments in their emissions reductions.

The exhaustive review from UN Environment, released on Monday, September 10, 2018 ahead of the Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS), highlights the crucial role of non-state actors in reducing emissions and reaching climate targets.

Ranging from city, state and regional governments to companies, investors, higher education institutions and civil society organisations, non-state actors are increasingly committing to bold climate action. As most national governments continue to come up short on their promises for better climate policy as pledged in the Paris Agreement, these efforts are increasingly recognised as a key element to achieving global emissions goals.

In total, the report finds these pledges represent a projected reduction of between 1.5 -2.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030.

But where the assessment finds encouraging potential for scale, it also reveals challenges related to monitoring, reporting and coordination. A lack of participation and facilitation from government further limits the overall impact of these commitments on global CO2 reduction.

The aggregated review of global commitments shows the scope and pace of climate action from subnational entities has surged to historic proportions in the three years since the Paris agreement. In all, the study examines more than 183 international cooperative initiatives and thousands of non-state actors spread across 7,000 cities, 133 countries and carried out by over 6,000 private sector companies. Through an analysis of geographic, sectoral and functional distribution, the report reveals vast potential hindered by limited implementation.

“Cities, states, civil society and the private sector can be the resource that puts the world over the top in our fight to reduce CO2 emissions,” said head of UN Environment, Erik Solheim.

“For global governments and the policymakers who would support this momentum my message is this: The time for political rhetoric is over. The world urgently needs leaders with the political courage to act. Non-state actors are stepping up, but they need government engagement to bridge the emissions gap. The time is now to put it all together and finally address our new climate reality.”

In addition to directly reducing emissions, the study emphasises the growing role of non-state actors as incubators and accelerators for new low emissions strategies. The authors found that where the sector lacks coordinated structure, individual initiatives are increasingly seen as a proving ground for technology development and diffusion.

Non-state actors frequently implement climate action through a range of networks that collate individual climate pledges and inventories (For example, C40 Cities for Climate Leadership), or through broader coalitions at the national or international levels. Over the past two decades, the number of these coalitions has grown significantly, often in concurrence with key international climate events such as the UN Climate Action Summit convened in 2014, and the Paris climate conference in 2015.

The most common sectors addressed by such coalitions of non-state actors correspond with the sectors identified as having high mitigation potential, including the energy, industry, forestry, transport, agriculture and building sectors.

The report authors emphasised that for non-state actors to succeed and foster credibility, their pledges and the surrounding governance need to follow good practices in climate action: the participants need the capacity to deliver the goals, leadership needs to be effective, the funding sustainable, and the goals well-defined. Finally, transparency is crucial to allow for monitoring effectiveness, efficiency, and credibility.

Many people in the United States tend to see global warming as a distant threat even though it poses significant risks to public health.

In a study, the Centre for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, found that informing people about the health implications of global warming can increase public engagement with the issue and reduce differences in opinion across political lines.

The study also found that people view certain health impacts from global warming differently from others. Notably, participants viewed information about illnesses from contaminated food and water, and disease‐carrying organisms as more worrisome and novel compared to other types of health impacts from global warming.

The findings, according to the Centre, provide the most definitive evidence to date about the importance of raising awareness about the health impacts of global warming.

The researchers called for a more effective outreach about the entire range of health risks, against the backdrop of the seeming widespread lack of awareness about the public health implications of climate change among Americans.

Public health officials were urged to strengthen public engagement specifically about illnesses caused by contaminated food and water, and by disease-carrying pests.

“We hope the results of this study will help to mobilise the public health community and catalyse additional research to figure out how to optimally target and tailor this information for a wide variety of audiences in order to reduce our collective vulnerability to the wide-ranging health threats from climate change,” says the Centre.

In the light of the fact that a small body of previous research suggests that information about the health implications of global warming may enhance public engagement with the issue, the Centre sought to extend those findings with a longitudinal study that examined how Americans react to information about eight specific categories of health impacts from global warming.

In winter 2017, the Centre conducted a two‐wave survey experiment using a quota sample of American adults (n=2254). Participants were randomly assigned to a treatment group which read eight brief essays about different categories of health impacts from global warming, or to a control group that received no information.

Participants answered questions before reading the essays, immediately after reading each essay and at the conclusion of all essays (treatment participants only), and two to three weeks later.

“Reading the information had small‐ to medium‐sized effects on multiple indicators of participants’ cognitive and affective engagement with global warming, especially among people who are politically moderate and somewhat conservative; some of these changes persisted two to three weeks later.

“Some impacts were seen as more novel and worrisome, including illnesses from contaminated food, water, and disease‐carrying organisms. Our findings provide the most definitive evidence to date about the importance of raising awareness about the health impacts of global warming. While participants believed all of the essays as offered valuable information, educational efforts might most productively focus on impacts that are relatively less familiar, and more emotionally engaging, such as food‐, water‐, and vector‐borne illnesses,” adds the Centre.