Mitigation

Mitigation of climate change refers to actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance carbon sinks, generally by promoting technologies such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, nuclear power, or carbon capture and storage, or by promoting land-use practices that sequester CO2. Technological methods of climate change mitigation may include improvements that reduce final energy use (e.g. buildings, industry, transportation), improve efficiency or otherwise reduce emissions in secondary energy production (e.g. electricity generation, liquid fuel refining), or reduce fugitive emissions from primary energy production and transport (e.g. coal mines, natural gas processing and piping). In addition to energy-focused strategies, reducing deforestation and deploying agricultural techniques that sequester CO2 may prove crucial in climate change mitigation.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calls for governments to incorporate mitigation measures into seven commercial sectors. These include: (1) agriculture; (2) building; (3) energy supply; (4) forestry; (5) industry; (6) transportation; (7) and waste management. The sector with the greatest capacity to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions is the energy sector. The transition from fossil fuels to climate-friendly energy sources will entail a dual strategy: 1) reducing the amount of energy required through energy efficiency measures and 2) meeting the remaining needs with renewable energy sources. Measures that improve energy efficiency reduce the amount of energy input required to produce a unit of output. Transitioning to renewable energy is another key strategy for reducing carbon emissions. Renewable energy is energy generated from resources that do not deplete the stock of energy found on the earth, such as sunlight, wind, tides and geothermal heat. Most forms of renewable energy generate no or low levels of greenhouse gas emissions. ¹

Appropriate long-term mitigation targets are subject to debate; according to the IPCC, to achieve a stabilization level of warming between 2°C and 2.8°C, global emissions must peak at some point between the present day and 2020, and decline to between 30% and 80% of 2000 levels by 2050.² This underscores an important point: even if greenhouse gas emissions are ceased immediately, there will still be approximately 2°C of warming in the next century, due to the long lifetimes of greenhouse gases that have already been emitted. In order to meet this challenge, governments from around the world are implementing mitigation measures and policies, some more progressive than others. The European Union, for example, is proposing to achieve at least 20% emissions reductions below 1990 levels by 2020 ³. Brazil says that it intends to reduce carbon emissions by reducing deforestation in the Amazon by 70% over the next 10 years ⁴ While the United States was in no position to make firm mitigation commitments at the recent United Nations Conference in Poznan, Poland, president-elect Obama is calling for an 80% drop in U.S. carbon emissions by 2050. ⁵ India and China have yet to make binding mitigation commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. ⁶