Next five years key to cracking climate crisis

“We absolutely can avoid dangerous climate change without stunting development and reducing living standards, but not if we delay”, said Mike Russill, President and CEO WWF-Canada.

WWF’s sophisticated model shows, for the first time and with a high degree of probability (greater than 90 per cent), that it is technically and industrially feasible to limit global greenhouse gas emissions despite a projected doubling in global energy demand.

The caveat is timing: policies and measures must be instituted within five years to reverse the upward trend of global warming emissions within 10 years.

WWF’s research identifies six key solutions, which must be aggressively employed as a package to meet growing global energy demand without damaging the global climate:

·Dramatically improving energy efficiency throughout the economy, to stop energy waste in buildings, transportation, appliances, motors, and industrial operations;
·Stopping forest loss, since degraded land is a source of greenhouse gases and the world loses the carbon storing value of living trees;
·Accelerating the development and deployment low-emissions technologies such as wind and solar;
·Developing energy storage for wind and solar, and new infrastructure for hydrogen fuel;
·Replacing high-carbon coal with low-carbon natural gas and renewable energy;
·Equipping major sources of carbon dioxide with “carbon capture and storage” technology, for instance tarsands operations and coal-fired power plants.

The scenario assumes that industrialized countries, whose rate of emissions are higher than developing countries, must reduce emissions more steeply than the global average so the world can equitably live within a carbon budget.

“The obvious conclusion is to reduce energy waste, deploy renewable energy and protect our forests,” says Julia Langer, Director of WWF-Canada’s Global Threats Program. “The harder reality must also be faced — accelerating fossil fuel development, such as by allowing Canada’s tarsands to be developed unchecked, is incompatible with living within a low-carbon budget.”

More than 100 scientists and experts contributed their knowledge to the study, which began by reviewing 25 commercially available sustainable energy sources or technologies. Three groupings emerged: those with clear benefits, those with some negative but mostly positive impacts, and those where the negatives clearly outweighed the benefits. The latter were rejected, including nuclear power, mega-hydroelectric, and unsustainably grown/harvested bio-fuels.