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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Established climate mitigation modelling relies on controversial negative emissions and unprecedented technological change, but neglects to consider degrowth scenarios. Here the authors show that degrowth scenarios minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability and thus need to be thoroughly assessed.

    • Lorenz T. Keyßer
    •  & Manfred Lenzen

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Negative emission technologies are central to avoiding catastrophic climate change. Deploying engineered solutions such as direct air capture requires a policy sequencing strategy that focuses on “incentives + mandates” in early adopters, while creating positive spillovers that incentivize follower countries to take policy action.

    • Jonas Meckling
    •  & Eric Biber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    BIPP with biochar sequestration is a ready-to-implement negative emission technology in China. Here, the authors show that its national deployment could contribute to a 61% reduction of carbon emissions per GDP in 2030 compared to 2005, and contribute 13–31% of the global biomass-based negative emission goal by 2050.

    • Qing Yang
    • , Hewen Zhou
    •  & Michael B. McElroy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A key strategy for meeting China’s 2060 carbon neutrality goal and the global 1.5 °C climate goal is to rapidly shift away from unabated coal use. Here, the authors detail how to structure a high-ambition, plant-by-plant coal phaseout in China while balancing multiple national needs.

    • Ryna Yiyun Cui
    • , Nathan Hultman
    •  & Mengye Zhu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Temperature changes as a result of climate change are expected to impact electric capacity and investment. Here, the authors show that in the United States under socioeconomic pathway 2 and RCP 8.5 mean temperature rises will drive increased electricity demand (0.5-8%) by 2100, along increases in capital investments by 3-22%.

    • Zarrar Khan
    • , Gokul Iyer
    •  & Marshall Wise

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many cities in the US self-report greenhouse gas emissions. Here, the authors find that US cities under-report their own greenhouse gas emissions, on average, by 18.3% because city inventories omit some fuels and source types and estimate transportation emissions differently.

    • Kevin Robert Gurney
    • , Jianming Liang
    •  & Thomas Lauvaux

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global energy transformation requires quantifying the "price of energy" and studying its evolution. Here the authors present a predictive framework that calculates the average US price of energy, estimating future energy demands for up to four years with excellent accuracy, designing and optimizing energy and monetary policies.

    • Stefanos G. Baratsas
    • , Alexander M. Niziolek
    •  & Efstratios N. Pistikopoulos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    For a given carbon budget between 2020 and 2050, different transformation rates for the European energy system yield starkly different results. Here the authors show that strongly reducing emissions in the first decade is cost-effective and entails additional benefits.

    • Marta Victoria
    • , Kun Zhu
    •  & Martin Greiner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    China has enacted Electric Heating Policy to substitute electricity for in-home combustion for rural residential heating. Here the authors show that this shift would greatly increase national carbon emissions by 101.69–162.89 megatons in 2015 while impeding China’s carbon mitigation process in the future.

    • Jianxiao Wang
    • , Haiwang Zhong
    •  & Chongqing Kang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate action from local actors is vital in achieving nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. Here the authors show that existing commitments from U.S. states, cities and business could reduce emissions 25% below 2005 levels by 2030, with expanded subnational action reducing emissions by 37% and federal action by up to 49%.

    • Nathan E. Hultman
    • , Leon Clarke
    •  & John O’Neill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Implementation of Central European electricity targets will redistribute regional benefits and burdens. Here the authors show that the aims of cost-efficiency, regional equality, and renewable electricity generation have vastly different implementation pathways, impacts, and trade-offs.

    • Jan-Philipp Sasse
    •  & Evelina Trutnevyte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The long-term availability of lithium in the event of significant demand growth of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries is important to assess. Here the authors assess lithium demand and supply challenges of a long-term energy transition using 18 scenarios, developed by combining 8 demand and 4 supply variations.

    • Peter Greim
    • , A. A. Solomon
    •  & Christian Breyer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global resources of heavy Rare Earth Elements (REE) are dominantly sourced from Chinese regolith-hosted ion-adsorption deposits, yet the adsorption mechanisms remain unclear. Here, the authors find that heavy REE are adsorbed as easily leachable 8-coordinated outer-sphere hydrated complexes, dominantly onto kaolinite, in clays from both China and Madagascar.

    • Anouk M. Borst
    • , Martin P. Smith
    •  & Kalotina Geraki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The allocation of remaining fossil fuel production has stimulated a discussion around issues of equitable allocation but the implications of different options are unclear. Here the authors show that shifting production to low-medium human development regions has limited economic benefits under strong climate policy.

    • Steve Pye
    • , Siân Bradley
    •  & Paul Ekins

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There lacks a method to measure the rapid changes of vehicle emissions. Here the authors proposed a big data approach ‘TrackATruck’, and their estimates using the new approach show that the heavy-duty trucks (HDT) emissions of primary cargo routes/terminals were underestimated by 2–10 times in proxy-based emission inventories.

    • Fanyuan Deng
    • , Zhaofeng Lv
    •  & Huan Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The decrease in costs of renewable energy and storage has not been well accounted for in energy modelling, which however will have a large effect on energy system investment and policies. Here the authors incorporated recent decrease in costs of renewable energy and storages to refine the pathways to decarbonize China’s power system by 2030 and show that if such cost trends for renewables continue, more than 60% of China’s electricity could come from non-fossil sources by 2030 at a cost that is about 10% lower than achieved through a business-as-usual approach.

    • Gang He
    • , Jiang Lin
    •  & Amol Phadke

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here the authors develop a set of global, long-term, spatial projections of urban land expansion for understanding the planet’s potential urban futures. The global total amount of urban land increases by a factor of 1.8-5.9 over the 21st century, and the developed world experiences as much new urban development as the developing world.

    • Jing Gao
    •  & Brian C. O’Neill

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The impacts of power plant water shortage during drought on electricity prices are understudied. Here the authors show that on extreme days, almost 50% (7 GWe) of the freshwater thermal capacity is unavailable in the Great Britain and annualized cumulative costs on electricity prices are in the range of £29-95m per year.

    • Edward A. Byers
    • , Gemma Coxon
    •  & Jim W. Hall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There lacks a comprehensive analysis on the large-scale deployment of solar photovoltaic projects and its impact on poverty alleviation. Here the authors show that solar photovoltaic poverty alleviation pilot policy increases per-capita disposable income in a county by approximately 7%-8%.

    • Huiming Zhang
    • , Kai Wu
    •  & Xianqiang Ren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The contributions of industrial parks towards addressing climate change remains unclear. Here, the authors studied the energy infrastructure of 1604 industrial parks in China and found that by decarbonizing energy infrastructure stocks in the industrial parks, the GHG mitigation potential will achieve 8%~16% relative to the GHG emissions in the baseline scenario with positive economic benefits, water savings and air pollutant emission reductions.

    • Yang Guo
    • , Jinping Tian
    •  & Lyujun Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The potential of seasonal pumped hydropower storage (SPHS) plant to fulfil future energy storage requirements is vast in mountainous regions. Here the authors show that SPHS costs vary from 0.007 to 0.2 US$ m−3 of water stored, 1.8 to 50 US$ MWh−1 of energy stored and 0.37 to 0.6 US$ GW−1 of installed power generation capacity.

    • Julian D. Hunt
    • , Edward Byers
    •  & Keywan Riahi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The carbon footprints of natural gas supplies at the field level are unclear. Here the authors analysed the GHG intensities of gas supplies from 104 fields and show that their GHG intensities range from 6.2 to 43.3 g CO2eq MJ-1.

    • Yu Gan
    • , Hassan M. El-Houjeiri
    •  & Michael Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite recent advances in flexible thermoelectric generators for wearable devices, current designs are unable to efficiently harvest heat flowing from human body. Here, the authors report high thermoelectric performance and stretchability in interlocked fiber-based modules for wearable devices.

    • Tingting Sun
    • , Beiying Zhou
    •  & Gerald Jeffrey Snyder

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Activities in cities are important drivers of global carbon fluxes. Here the authors trace the carbon metabolism in 16 global cities in terms of both physical and virtual carbon inflows, stock changes and outflows in relation to the supply chains of urban production and consumption and show that the total carbon impacts of global cities are found to be highly varied in either per capita, intensity or density measures.

    • Shaoqing Chen
    • , Bin Chen
    •  & Klaus Hubacek

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The role of solar and wind energy (SWE) in management of water-food-energy (WFE) nexus is largely neglected. Here the authors developed a trade-off frontier framework to quantify the water sustainability value of SWE and applied it in California, where they found that SWE penetration creates beneficial feedback for the WFE nexus by enhancing drought resilience and benefits groundwater sustainability over long run.

    • Xiaogang He
    • , Kairui Feng
    •  & Justin Sheffield

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Improving residential building energy consumption (RBEC) efficiency is important. The authors here test whether the measure truly reflects efficiency, and found that RBEC per square meter decreases with the increase of the building area per household, indicating the dilution effect.

    • Jingxin Gao
    • , Xiaoyang Zhong
    •  & Zhifu Mi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Computable General Equilibrium models can hardly decouple economic growth and energy consumption while energy system models can hardly predict macroeconomic implications of energy system changes. Here the authors investigated the macroeconomic implications of consistently dealing with energy systems and the stability of further power generation and show that GDP losses were significantly lower than those in the conventional economic model by more than 50% in 2050, while industry and service sector energy consumption are the main factors causing these differences.

    • Shinichiro Fujimori
    • , Ken Oshiro
    •  & Tomoko Hasegawa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The plant-by-plant retirement needs are not well-understood yet to achieve the rapid transition away from coal use. Here the authors found that operational lifetimes of existing units must be reduced to approximately 35 years to keep warming well below 2 °C or 20 years for 1.5 °C, even if no new capacity comes online.

    • Ryna Yiyun Cui
    • , Nathan Hultman
    •  & Christine Shearer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is not clear which are the most effective mechanisms to achieve sustainable lifestyle behaviour. Here the authors study the impact of behavioural interventions excluding economic incentives by performing a large-scale meta-analysis and find that these interventions promote sustainable behaviours to a small degree in the short-term with no evidence of sustained positive effects once the intervention is completed.

    • Claudia F. Nisa
    • , Jocelyn J. Bélanger
    •  & Daiane G. Faller

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some dams produce large amounts of GHGs and it is important to see whether future dams will satisfy sustainable energy goals. Here the authors estimate the range of GHG emission intensities expected for 351 proposed and 158 existing Amazon dams and find that existing Amazon hydropower reservoirs collectively emit 14 Tg CO2eq per year, and that if all proposed Amazon dams are built, annual emissions would increase 5-fold.

    • Rafael M. Almeida
    • , Qinru Shi
    •  & Alexander S. Flecker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Building retrofits offer enormous potential for energy reduction and must be designed with occupancy in mind. Here, the authors developed a method for estimating building occupancy at urban scale using mobile phone traces and they find that energy saving estimates differ by +1 to −15% for residential buildings and by −4 to −21% for commercial buildings.

    • Edward Barbour
    • , Carlos Cerezo Davila
    •  & Marta C. González

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Nuclear reactors can be used for energy generation or for dangerous weapons and therefore their monitoring is crucial. Here the authors discuss detecting antineutrino from a nuclear reactor and use it for nuclear safeguards in a diversion scenario.

    • Christopher Stewart
    • , Abdalla Abou-Jaoude
    •  & Anna Erickson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Residential solid fuel use constitutes a large amount of air pollution but has been gradually replaced by other cleaner energy during the past three decades. Here the authors investigated the contribution of rural residential sector to ambient PM2.5 pollution and the resulting climate forcing and health impacts, and find that the remaining large quantities of solid fuels used in rural households are still a major contributor to ambient air pollution despite of decrease in its pollutant emissions and relative contribution to PM2.5 due to the clean energy transition.

    • Guofeng Shen
    • , Muye Ru
    •  & Shu Tao

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Existing studies on the economic feasibility of energy storage are system-specific without considering the decarbonisation of electricity production or impacts of GHG taxes. Here the authors applied an optimization model to investigate the economic viability of nice selected energy storage technologies in California and found that renewable curtailment and GHG reductions highly depend on capital costs of energy storage.

    • Maryam Arbabzadeh
    • , Ramteen Sioshansi
    •  & Gregory A. Keoleian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) is not considered in Integrated Assessment Models. Here the authors make comparisons using multi-model regarding the role of DACCS in 1.5 and 2 degree scenarios and find that DACCS allows to postpone mitigation and reduce the climate policy costs.

    • Giulia Realmonte
    • , Laurent Drouet
    •  & Massimo Tavoni

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Future energy demand maybe induced by climate change and subject to uncertainties arising from different extent of climate change and socioeconomic development. Here the authors follow a top-down approach and combined the recently developed socio-economic and climate scenarios and found that across 210 scenarios, moderate warming increases global climate-exposed energy demand before adaptation by 25–58% between 2010 and 2050.

    • Bas J. van Ruijven
    • , Enrica De Cian
    •  & Ian Sue Wing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aerosol impacts have not been comprehensively considered in the cost-benefit integrated assessment models that are widely used to analyze climate policy. Here the authors account for these impacts and find that the health co-benefits from improved air quality outweigh the co-harms from increased near-term warming, and that optimal climate policy results in immediate net benefits globally.

    • Noah Scovronick
    • , Mark Budolfson
    •  & Fabian Wagner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is important to examine the economic viability of battery storage investments. Here the authors introduced the Levelized Cost of Energy Storage metric to estimate the breakeven cost for energy storage and found that behind-the-meter storage installations will be financially advantageous in both Germany and California.

    • Stephen Comello
    •  & Stefan Reichelstein

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Climate change represents an existential, global threat to humanity, yet its delocalized nature complicates climate action. Here, the authors propose retrofitting air conditioning units as integrated, scalable, and renewable-powered devices capable of decentralized CO2 conversion and energy democratization.

    • Roland Dittmeyer
    • , Michael Klumpp
    •  & Geoffrey Ozin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The technical and economic viability of renewable energy (RE) based energy system is understudied. Here the authors utilized a LUT Energy System Transition Model to indicate that a carbon neutral electricity system can be built in all global regions in an economically feasible way but requires evolutionary changes for the following 35 years.

    • Dmitrii Bogdanov
    • , Javier Farfan
    •  & Christian Breyer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is not clear how the public views the acceptability of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Here the authors explored public perceptions of BECCS by situating the technology in three policy scenarios and found that the policy instrument used to incentivise BECCS significantly affects the degree of public support for the technology.

    • Rob Bellamy
    • , Javier Lezaun
    •  & James Palmer

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