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World can ‘live prosperously’ and fight climate change

The world’s population is still able to fight climate change while retaining a prosperous quality of life, according to the team behind the new ‘Global Calculator’ – an open-source model of the world’s energy, land and food systems.

The tool, a project from an international team led by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), allows users to play with a set of levers, each representing the level of ambition given to a technology or behaviour change, to see effects on global energy use, emissions and temperature change in the future.

DECC says that the tool, an extension of the Department’s original UK 2050 Calculator, indicates that cutting carbon emissions to limit global temperatures to a 2°C rise can be achieved whilst improving living standards for the world’s growing population. But it also stresses the need for urgent action to achieve this outcome.

In the model a set of 40 main levers are grouped into 14 ‘lever types’. These levers are numbered one to four – setting to one indicates a low effort to address emissions, and level four represents an ‘extraordinarily ambitious’ effort with low emissions.

The levers correspond to ambition levels on varying aspects of energy supply and demand, as well as lifestyle factors. The model then equates the user preferences into emission levels, cumulative emissions, and then the subsequent climatic impact of these.

The spatial and temporal coarseness of the model (a means of keeping it simple) means it is suited to answering long-term strategic questions on energy supply and demand technologies – rather than investigating country-specific effects of a given action, for example. It also says nothing about equality.

The calculator is designed as an interactive tool for businesses, NGOs and governments to consider options for cutting carbon emissions and the trade-offs for energy and land use to 2050. It comes pre-loaded with various scenarios demonstrating different pathways towards keeping below 2°C, but users are also free to make their own choices and see how they affect the future.

You can create your own 2°C future at www.globalcalculator.org

 

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