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 concentrati"