Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
5/29/2015
The World Bank stressed the need to act now to develop the climate mitigation technologies that will be needed in the future to stave off climate change in a new report released last week. The report notes the eventual need for bio-carbon capture and storage as a necessity to achieving global net zero emissions. However, without CCS, bio-CCS is not possible. “The availability and acceptability of technologies (such as nuclear or carbon capture and sequestration [CCS]) are uncertain. Most of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios that achieve a temperature rise below 2°C assume negative emissions in the second half of the century. But if technologies to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere are not available, even greater efforts will be needed from other sectors,” the report says.
The report notes that achieving net zero global emissions does not mean that there can be no positive emissions, but that any positive emissions would have to be offset by negative emissions elsewhere. This can be done by implementing, among other things, bio-CCS. “Carbon neutrality is needed by 2100 if we hope to stabilize the climate anywhere below 3°C. Moreover, achieving the 2°C target will necessitate negative emissions—that is, removing CO2 from the atmosphere—in the second part of this century. Negative emissions can be achieved through increased natural carbon sinks—such as reforestation, which captures atmospheric CO2 and stocks it as vegetation. It can also be done using specific technologies, such as biofuels used in power plants combined with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS),” according to the report.
Further, if investments in clean energy technologies, such as CCS, are not made immediately, those investments may instead be used to develop more high carbon emitting sources resulting in longer-term emissions, the World Bank warned. “The failure to act early means that large amounts of CO2 emissions are ‘committed’ far into the future, because they are embedded in installed capital (like existing power plants, transport systems, and industrial, residential, and commercial infrastructure that often have long lifetimes) In fact, … the long lifetime of some components of existing capital—such as transport networks and urban development patterns, which can range from 40 to 200 years— means that emissions will continue over the next decades and even beyond, unless retrofitting is possible,” the report says.
