On Monday, April 4, the Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Local weather Change (IPCC) will launch its report, the ultimate report due out as a part of the IPCC’s Sixth Evaluation Report. The Working Group III report focuses on mitigation of local weather change, assessing solution to cut back greenhouse gasoline emissions and eradicating greenhouse gases from Earth’s environment.
Rachel Jonassen is an affiliate analysis professor in sustainable city planning on the George Washington College and the director of local weather change and greenhouse gasoline administration at GW’s Environmental & Vitality Administration Institute. Her experience contains, amongst different issues, local weather change science and danger, greenhouse gasoline mitigation, hydroclimatology, science coverage and displacement on account of local weather change.
Dr. Jonassen provided the next assertion:
“Cities are the important thing to local weather change mitigation. Most emissions come from cities—that is true in almost all international locations. Furthermore, a couple of huge cities worldwide are accountable for almost all of metropolis emissions worldwide.
Consumption drives metropolis emissions, and most cities produce way more emissions with the products they import and devour than with the products they produce internally. This drawback of consumption as a driver of emissions will solely develop as particular person wealth around the globe grows.
Furthermore, solely a small proportion of cities worldwide have a whole image of their very own emissions, which limits their means to set and observe discount targets. But, rising huge knowledge strategies will help cities not solely determine emission sources inside metropolis boundaries but in addition observe reductions of these sources.
Stronger insurance policies are additionally wanted to facilitate a faster shift towards renewable vitality sources. The price of photo voltaic and wind are nonetheless too excessive to compete with fossil fuels, and the issue of scaling up the availability of uncooked supplies wanted for mitigation—resembling for photo voltaic panels and batteries—is turning into a barrier to increasing their use and placing stress on supply international locations whereas resulting in intense competitors.
Hydrogen—as an vitality storage medium, a method of transporting vitality, and a high-density vitality supply—is without doubt one of the huge surprises to emerge because the IPCC’s Fifth Evaluation Report as a method to cut back emissions. Likewise, the explosive progress of the voluntary carbon market is an underappreciated device for transferring technical and monetary assist to creating international locations.”