The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes CO2 emissions must peak within three years to ensure a liable future. With this in mind, the third part of the IPCC’s sixth report, published on April 04, presents solutions for reducing the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. The first part of the report, published in August 2021, reviewed the scientific evidence of the impact of human activities on climate change.
The second part, published in February 2022, presented the impacts on populations and ecosystems and showed their vulnerability to climate change. The raw message is encouraging because, as Céline Guivarch, Research Director at the International Center for Research on Environment and Development and one of the report’s authors, points out, solutions do exist to reduce emissions by 2030, and they concern all areas.
However, containing temperature trends below 1.5˚C with current commitments is impossible, major and rapid changes are needed in all sectors, as experts have set 2025 as the date by which the peak in CO2 emissions must be reached to be still able to reverse the trend and maintain a liable world.
First and foremost, the use of fossil fuels must be sharply reduced by 2050 to meet the target set in the Paris Agreement, with a total end to the use of coal and a 60% reduction in oil and 70% in gas compared with 2019 levels. By that date, almost all the world’s electricity will have to come from low- or zero-carbon sources.
The report also looks at carbon capture solutions, which play an important role in some countries’ plans to achieve carbon neutrality, even if the technology is not yet considered mature. Céline Guivarch reminds us that positive carbon emissions must be sharply reduced and that it is residual emissions that can be offset by negative emissions.
Different types of carbon absorption exist geological or chemical, such as reforestation or agroforestry, and technological. But technology must not be the only answer, as Nadia Maïzi, lead author of the IPCC’s sixth report and professor and laboratory director at Mines Paris, warns that the message conveyed by innovations can be ambivalent, leading people to believe that it is possible to change nothing since technology will enable us to capture all the CO2 produced.
The IPCC also raises the question of sobriety in the face of growing energy demand and estimates that action on the demand for and consumption of goods and services could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40-70% by 2050.
The word sobriety is not used, but one of the expert group’s co-chairmen, Priyadarshi Shukla, points out that it is possible to implement conditions that encourage changes in our lifestyles and behaviors, which are still largely under-exploited.
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