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Nations and companies pursuing net-zero goals must be careful
when they turn to "holy grail" decarbonizing tools like hydropower,
nature-based solutions (NBS), and bioenergy with carbon capture and
storage (BECCS).
The warning came in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change's (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report released on 28 February, as it
presented a picture of "potentially irreversible" climate change
impacts.
Both the US and the EU, which have pledged to reach net-zero by
2050, acknowledged the urgency of the situation presented in the
IPCC report. "The IPCC report underscores the ways climate impacts
are affecting lives and livelihoods globally now," said US
Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a
statement.
The Sixth Assessment came from Working Group II, and it's the
second of three reports to come after COP26 in November. Its key
finding is that there are limits to how well humans can adapt to
damage done by a hotter and wetter climate.
Evidence of limits on what can be saved is strongest for small
island states but also cities, food, and water systems in South
America, as well as coasts in North America and Africa, a chart within the IPCC report
shows.
Even so, adaptation is needed now, and steps must be taken soon.
"The evidence shows that taking action now to ensure all [net-zero]
infrastructure is designed to be resilient to future climate from
the outset is more cost-effective and efficient than retrofitting
it later," Richard Dawson, a Newcastle University professor and
member of the working group authoring the report, told Net-Zero
Business Daily by S&P Global Commodity Insights.
Not only existing infrastructure, but also net-zero
infrastructure requires adaptation. "If we manage to limit global
warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, there will still be increased
risk to society and infrastructure installed to achieve net-zero,"
added Dawson.
Mitigation finance so far has dwarfed adaptation finance, for
example in national net-zero plans, partly because mitigation is
cheaper than adaptation.
Renewable energy adaptation
Using renewable energy — specifically generation such as
wind, solar, and small-scale hydropower — can reduce cities'
vulnerabilities to climate change by adding diverse and
decentralized power sources, the report found.
But at about 2 degrees Celsius global warming, snowmelt
availability decline and global glacier loss would diminish water
availability for hydropower. "Adaptations for hydropower and
thermo-electric power generation are effective in most regions up
to 1.5 degrees to 2 degrees Celsius, with decreasing effectiveness
at higher levels of warming," the report warned.
More energy sources should be combined with measures that add
flexibility. For example, energy storage, energy efficiency, and
smart-grid technologies. Countries also need "robust" networks and
systems to enable rapid response to outages.
Governments must restructure energy markets and update equipment
design standards to encourage adapting power plants to climate
change, the report added.
Global Wind Energy Council CEO Ben Backwell warned that because
the report is only published every 6-7 years, this would be the
"last call to action to all policymakers to strengthen climate
ambitions" and that "near-term actions to cut emissions," for
example deploying renewable energy, were the only real
solutions.
A digitized power sector should work with the sectors that rely
on it to prevent blackouts from leading to humanitarian
catastrophe. "Cascading failures have been observed around the
world as loss of power or [internet] can lead to knock-on
disruption to other key services such as lighting, heat, water, and
sanitation," Dawson said.
BECCs, bioenergy, NBS risk being "maladaptive"
The report warned that net-zero infrastructure that is either
wrongly implemented or inflexible could be costly to correct and
could do harm.
One technology seen as crucial for helping to attain needed
global emissions cuts is BECCs, or the burning of carbon-absorbing
biomass while capturing its emissions to attain negative emissions
overall.
The report's authors noted that BECCS would be necessary to
attain Paris Agreement goals, but has to be built carefully to
avoid taking up cropland needed to grow food and habitats for
animal species.
"BECCS is an integral part of all widely accepted pathways to
holding global temperature rise to 1.5°C. This requires large areas
of land which can conflict with the need to produce food and 30
protect biodiversity," the report stated.
Supporting the need for care with BECCS, a report released this month by
the European Academies' Science Advisory Council said "the science
does not support launching into the conversion of existing
large-scale forest biomass power stations to BECCS," but instead
supports power plants using local feedstocks such as grass or
waste.
The panel's warnings extended to NBS, for example, tree planting
used by many energy companies trying to reach net-zero targets.
The IPCC supported reforestation of formerly forested areas,
such as in urban areas, but it warned planting trees can also lead
to climate change because draining land for afforestation can cause
an overall increase in GHGs and warmth.
It recommended not planting trees in open grasslands, densely
wooded savannas, peatland, and shrubland, but instead restoring
existing forests and ecosystems.
Nevertheless, nature-based coastal adaptations are seen in a
more positive light.
Experts agreed on the need to shift adaptation finance away from
building structures like seawalls towards cheaper NBS like beach
and shore nourishment, although they noted that the idea NBS alone
could provide a solution to climate change was a
"misunderstanding."
While effective in the short term, many adaptation solutions can
increase exposure to climate risks unless they are integrated into
a long-term adaptive plan, the report found. For this reason, city
development plans should be taking adaptation into account
today.
The report references a Spanish government irrigation project
intended to adapt farms to climate change that inadvertently made
small-scale producers more vulnerable to climate change because
they sold their land to the project.
Other adaptation options include managed migration, but the
report noted "important uncertainties [remain] as international
regimes develop around human rights, migration, displacement and
the implications for the national sovereignty of disappearing land
spaces caused by climate change."
This article was published by S&P Global Commodity Insights and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.