In advance of the 2019 United Nations Climate Summit in New York City, an international group of experts have published the Exponential Roadmap: the 36 most viable solutions to halve greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally by 2030. The solutions – ranging from solar and wind to electric bikes, commercial shipping and reduced red meat consumption – are said to have the potential to scale rapidly.
Stabilising Earth’s temperature to significantly reduce risks to societies now requires GHG emissions to reach net zero by 2050. This translates to cutting GHGs by about 50% by 2030 alongside significant removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“While this scale of transformation is unprecedented, the speed is not,” says report author Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany and co-chair of Future Earth, an international research programme.
“This is now a race against time, but businesses and even entire industries have made many significant transitions in less than 10 years,” he adds.
Christiana Figueres, former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and Convenor of Mission 2020, a partner organisation in the roadmap, says, “I see all evidence that social and economic tipping points are aligning. We can now say the next decade has the potential to see the fastest economic transition in history. The 2019 Exponential Roadmap is an excellent guide for the necessary journey to net-zero emissions.”
Manuel Pugal-Vidal, leader of the climate and energy practice at WWF, a partner of the report, notes, “Governments must introduce national targets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 with targets to cut emissions 50% by 2030. Immediate removal of fossil-fuel subsidies is a priority. Yet policies must be equitable and fair or risk failure.”
“Developed nations with significant historic emissions also have a responsibility to reduce emissions faster. Cities and states – not only countries – will also be important change makers,” he adds.
The report highlights four approaching tipping points that combined will accelerate the transformation:
- Growing social movements (for example, Fridays for Future) changing the public conversation in parallel with companies and cities stepping up climate action.
- Emerging political support for more ambitious targets, for example countries such as the UK, France, Norway and Sweden adopting laws to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 or earlier.
- Solar and wind energy have reached a tipping point and are now cheaper than fossil fuels in many places. Tumbling costs and rapid innovation of low-emissions technology including battery storage and electric vehicles makes a very rapid transformation almost inevitable.
- Digitalisation and global communications allow more rapid scaling than previous transformations.
“This roadmap uniquely focuses on three things. The immediate priorities – reaching peak emissions in 2020 and racing to cut emissions in half by 2030. How we scale the new solutions exponentially. And how we need to think in terms of systems transformation of the whole economy,” says Johan Falk, an expert in exponential strategies, co-lead author and a fellow at Stockholm Resilience Centre and Future Earth, Sweden.
The authors see the circular economy as one of the most significant ways for industries to reduce emissions.
“An immediate priority is to build the policy environment for a circular economy. This could provide half of the emissions reductions we need by 2030 from key industry,” says Falk.
The report is a collaboration between academia, business, and civil society groups solutions in six sectors: energy, industry, transport, buildings, food consumption, and nature-based solutions. In the energy sector, the authors conclude the world has reached a tipping point.
“Low cost solar, wind and battery technologies are on profitable, exponential trajectories that will be enough to halve emissions from electricity generation by 2030,” says Tomas Kåberger, lead author of the energy chapter from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
“In some less developed markets, however, support is still needed to ensure this scale,” he adds.
However, the report also warns fossil-fuel subsidies remain barriers to exponential growth of renewables and continued investment in fossil-fuel infrastructure is not compatible with the 1.5°C climate target.
In transport, electric vehicles have the potential to reach a 90% market share by 2030, but only if strong policies support this direction. Even shipping can reduce emissions 50% with modifications to routes, speed, and fuel types. The world’s largest container shipping company, Maersk, for example, has now committed to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
The new roadmap includes findings from several major academic assessments on food system transformation that have been published in the past year, including the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems and the IPCC climate change and land report.
“Food and agriculture is the dark horse in the fight against climate change. It may be the hardest sector to rapidly halve emissions,” says Brent Loken from the EAT Foundation and lead author of the chapters on food consumption and nature-based solutions.
It will require a dietary transition from high consumption of red meat and ultra-processed foods to a healthier diet with plenty of fruit, legumes and vegetables. In addition, the roll out globally of more sustainable farming practices. Barriers include poor land-use planning, contradictory subsidies, focus on quick profits, regulatory barriers, insufficient funding, lack of knowledge, and vested interests could slow progress.
But avoiding deforestation, in addition to reforestation and improved land management is a significant opportunity to reduce and sequester greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The authors estimate nature-based solutions could be used to sequester around 9 billion tonnes of CO2 annually by 2030.
The building sector also requires profound changes. Reducing greenhouse gases 50% can be delivered through greater efficiencies in use of building space alongside energy efficient refurbishment and net zero-emission construction.
The second in its series, the 2019 Exponential Roadmap is complemented with a high-ambition narrative, “Meeting the 1.5°C Ambition”, that presents why the world must aim to hold global average temperature increase to just 1.5°C. Each new roadmap updates solutions that have proven potential to scale and charts progress towards exponential scaling, using exponential strategies needed to cut emissions 50 percent by 2030 or earlier, then doing it again by 2040 and again by 2050. The first was published in 2018 at the Global Climate Action Summit.
Since the first roadmap, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. The report concluded that the economic and humanitarian risks of a 2°C world are significantly higher than one at 1.5°C. Yet if emissions continue at current rates, within ten to fifteen years we will lose the chance to remain in a world at only 1.5°C.
“Ericsson, believe leveraging technology, such as digitalisation and 5G, will be fundamental to halve emissions every decade. We have through the exponential roadmap demonstrated that existing solutions are enough to make this transition. Now other companies and policy-makers must act to scale demonstrated solutions to enable exponential reduction of carbon emissions globally,” stresses Börje Ekholm, CEO, Ericsson.
