Forestry and agriculture are two sectors that must help lead an economic transformation toward climate sustainability beginning over the next five years. Renewable energy, carbon capture and storage and energy efficiency are the other key areas in which rapid expansion is necessary to avoid the serious risk of runaway climate change, according to the widely-reported WWF study 'Climate Solutions 2' released this week.
To have a better than even chance of avoiding temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius global greenhouse emissions will have to be cut by 63 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. To achieve this, the five identified low-carbon fields will have to be expanding at 22 to 26 per cent a year within five years. Therefore, specific and widespread action is needed to put in place a low-carbon re-industrialisation by 2014, the report concludes. The study stresses that investment in these sectors will not ultimately be a cost but will deliver net economic returns to society in savings and profits by the late 2020s.
A clear message in the report is that the challenge will have to be tackled from both sides. That is, not just transforming industry to a low-emissions base, but significantly increasing carbon removals from the atmosphere through sustainable forestry and carbon-absorbing agricultural practices. Preventing deforestation, afforestation & reforestation, as well as storing carbon in agricultural soils using biochar and low-till farming are seen as the key areas with the potential for high-volume land-based carbon removals. The report also earmarks carbon storage in wood products and substituting fossil fuels with forest-derived biomass energy as valuable contributors.
WWF warns against reliance on carbon pricing – emissions trading and carbon taxes – saying such measures alone will not bring about the needed investment. In particular, the study maintains that including avoided deforestation in global carbon trading must not be done in a way that allows forest and farming carbon removals to traded off against industrial emissions of fossil fuels. In essence, this means targets to reduce deforestation in tropical countries must be additional to – rather than offsetting - targets to lower energy and industrial emissions in developed and fast-developing countries.
The study’s estimates are based on modelling of world industrial growth under the Climate Risk Industry Sector Technology Allocation (CRISTAL) model. It finds that of roughly 85 billion tonnes of emissions reductions that need to be found annually by 2050 to achieve the 63 per cent reduction scenario, 16 billion tonnes will need to come from agriculture and forestry. But the proportion would need to be bigger in the early years up to 2020 – around 30 per cent of emissions reductions – while new industrial technologies are being developed and deployed. And this underlines the need for “international financial compensation schemes”, such as REDD, to be implemented relatively quickly, the report says.
Downloads
Climate Solutions 2 – Exec. SummaryClimate Solutions 2 – Full report [PDF 7.7 MB]