Society-wide scenarios for effective climate change mitigation in Ireland (Technical Report)

Abstract

Global climate action is not currently aligned with staying within remaining global cumulative carbon dioxide (CO2) budgets (GCBs) corresponding to the Paris Agreement temperature limits of "well below 2°C" and making efforts toward a lower limit of 1.5°C over pre-industrial. Moreover, GCB estimates depend critically on also achieving commensurate reductions in emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O) and in methane (CH4). Societal well-being and economic growth continue to be highly dependent on climate polluting inputs – fossil fuels for energy, cement and steel for infrastructure, and nitrogen inputs to agriculture. The research project Society-wide Scenarios for Effective Climate Change Mitigation in Ireland (SSECCM) was a one-year, preliminary desk study undertaken to inform implementation of Irish policy on climate mitigation in the context of EU and Paris Agreement objectives. It evaluated international studies of society-wide, long-term climate action scenarios, identifying relevance to the specific situation in Ireland. While CO2 remains the single most important greenhouse gas to consider, emissions of CH4 and N2O also make a significant contribution to global climate disruption . The latter two are especially important to Ireland because, though CO2 remains the dominant GHG, we have comparatively high emissions of these other GHGs, primarily from ruminant livestock agriculture. A new open-source spreadsheet tool, "GHG-WE", was developed for the project and has also been made available online . This tool incorporates GWP* (modified Global Warming Potential), a new, recently developed, metric to better represent the combined climate effects of different greenhouse gases. This enables comparative national-level "warming-equivalent" analysis of society-wide and sectoral policy alternatives. An additional tool, a "Methane Warming Calculator" has also been developed and released for simplified, CH4 only, scenario exploration . The collected supporting literature is now publicly available in an online bibliographic ...