The world in 2050 - Impact of global growth on carbon emissions

The rapid economic growth of emerging countries such as China and India — together with continued more moderate growth in today’s advanced economies — could have serious long-term consequences for global energy consumption and carbon emissions.
The projections demonstrate that if countries sit back and adopt a "business as usual" approach, the result could be a more than doubling of global carbon emissions by 2050. Based on current scientific thinking, this could have potentially serious longer term implications in terms of global warming and related climate change.
On the other hand a scenario such as the "Green Growth Plus" strategy outlined in the report could allow for continued healthy growth whilst controlling carbon emissions.
These are just some of the points highlighted in a new PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report entitled The World in 2050: Implications of global growth for carbon emissions and climate change policy.
The report considers six possible scenarios but focuses most attention on two key possibilities:
A baseline scenario in which energy efficiency improves in line with trends of the past 25 years, with no change in fuel mix by country; this ‘business as usual’ scenario acts as a benchmark against which to assess the need for change, rather than as a forecast of the most likely outcome; and
A scenario called Green Growth + CCS, which incorporates possible emission reductions due to a greener fuel mix, annual energy efficiency gains over and above the historic trend, and widespread use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Of the scenarios considered in the report, only this ‘Green Growth Plus’ strategy stabilises atmospheric CO2 concentrations by 2050 at what the current scientific consensus suggests would be broadly acceptable levels.
The G7 economies — the US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Canada — may need to take the lead in reducing their carbon emissions, given that emissions from the faster-growing emerging economies will almost certainly continue to rise over the next few decades.
This latest PwC report follows on from one published in March 2006 which highlighted the rapid growth potential of the "E7" emerging economies — China, India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey — leading up to 2050. Take a look at this report, entitled The World in 2050: How big will the major emerging market economies get and how can the OECD compete?, for more details of the methodology used to project GDP growth in the new report.
The author of both reports is John Hawksworth, head of macroeconomics at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ UK firm. He says: "As they increase in relative size to overtake the current G7 countries, the emerging ‘E7’ economies will increasingly provide the motor for global growth and could account for almost half of global carbon emissions by 2050 according to our model. But this begs the question: Can the world sustain such rapid growth without serious adverse effects on its climate? Our new report provides one possible answer to how this might be achieved".
The chart below shows how it might be possible to get from the baseline scenario to the preferred Green Growth + CCS scenario for global carbon emissions in three steps.
Global carbon emmissions from fossil fuels-->
drawImage("world2050_fossilfuels.jpg", "The World in 2050 – Global carbon emmissions from fossil fuels (GtC pa)", "", "");

Source: PwC model projections: the four lines correspond (starting from the top) to our baseline, Greener Fuel Mix, Green Growth, and Green Growth + CCS scenarios. The latter should be broadly consistent with stabilising global atmospheric CO2 concentrations at around 450ppm by 2050, as discussed in detail in the report.-->The report also indicates how carbon emissions might need to evolve by country to achieve the Green Growth + CCS scenario, as summarised in the charts below. We can see that the G7 economies will need to reduce their current level of emissions by around half by 2050 to achieve this scenario, whereas the E7 economies would still be able to increase their emissions by around 30% from current levels.
drawImage("world2050_country_graph.jpg", "The World in 2050 – Carbon emissions from fossil fuels by country in Green Growth + CCS ", "", "");


drawImage("world2050_region_graph.jpg", "The World in 2050 – Baseline scenario to Green Growth + CCS ", "", "");

These charts also show the growing weight of the E7 emerging economies (particularly China and India) in global carbon emissions relative to the current G7 advanced economies. According to the model, China is set to overtake the US as the leading carbon emitter by 2010, while total E7 emissions would be more than double total G7 emissions by 2050. Together the ‘Big 3’ economies (China, US and India) are projected to account for just over half of global emissions by 2050 in both our Baseline and Green Growth + CCS scenarios (though the absolute levels of emissions are much lower in the latter case), up from around 45% today. The EU’s share of global emissions is set to decline from around 15% now to just under 9% by 2050.
John Hawksworth concludes: "Our analysis suggests that there are technologically feasible and relatively low-cost options for controlling carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Estimates suggest that the level of GDP might be reduced by no more than around 2-3% in 2050 if this strategy was followed, equivalent to sacrificing only around a year of economic growth for the sake of reducing carbon emissions in 2050 by around 60% compared to our baseline scenario".
"But if this is to be achieved, it will take further concerted action by governments, businesses and individuals over a broad range of measures to boost energy efficiency, adopt a greener fuel mix, and introduce carbon capture and storage technologies in power plants and other major industrial facilities".