The role of technologies

Virtually all scenarios assume that technological and structural changes occur during this century, leading to relative reduction of emissions compared with the hypothetical case of attempting to ‘keep’ the emission intensities of GDP and economic structures the same as today (see Chapter 2, Section 2.9.1.3].

Baseline scenarios usually assume significant technological change and diffusion of new and advanced technologies. In mitigation scenarios there is additional technological change ‘induced’ through various policies and measures. Long-term stabilization scenarios highlight the importance of technology improvements, advanced technologies, learning by doing and endogenous technology change both for achieving the stabilization targets and for cost reduction. While the technology improvement and use of advanced technologies have been introduced in scenarios largely exogenously in most of the literature, new literature covers learning-by-doing and endogenous technological change. These newer scenarios show higher benefits of early action, as models assume that early deployment of technologies leads to benefits of learning and cost reductions (high agreement, much evidence) [3.4].

The different scenario categories also reflect different contributions of mitigation measures. However, all stabilization scenarios concur that 60–80% of all reductions would come from the energy and industry sectors. Non-CO₂ gases and land-use would contribute the remaining 30–40% (see for illustrative examples Figure TS. 10). New studies exploring more stringent stabilization levels indicate that a wider portfolio of technologies is needed. Those could include nuclear, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and bioenergy with carbon capture and geologic storage (BECS) (high agreement, much evidence) [3.3.5].