Pardee-Supported Study on Rising Energy Demand Due to Climate Change Published in Nature Communications
A new paper published today in Nature Communications by researchers from Boston University, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice found that by mid-century climate change will increase the demand for energy globally, even with modest warming.
Most previous studies explored this topic for a single country or continent, or for a single sector (mostly households). In addition, researchers only employed climate projections from either a single, or just a few climate models. In this new study, the authors did a global analysis using temperature projections from 21 climate models, and population and economy projections for five socioeconomic scenarios. This information was fed into a statistical model to calculate changes in demand for three fuels and four economic sectors to determine how energy demand would shift relative to today’s climate under modest and high warming scenarios around 2050.
The findings indicate that, compared to baseline scenarios in which energy demand is driven by population and income growth alone, climate change increases the global demand for energy around 2050 by 11-27 percent in a modest warming scenario, and 25-58 percent in a high warming scenario. Large areas of the tropics, as well as southern Europe, China, and the U.S., are likely to experience the largest changes in demand, driven in large part by electricity needed for cooling in the industry and service sectors of the economy.
The magnitude of the increase depends on three uncertain factors: the future pathways of global greenhouse gas emissions, the different ways that climate models use this information to project future hot and cold temperature extremes in various world regions, and the manner in which countries’ energy consumption patterns change under different scenarios of future increases in population and income.
The study was authored by Bas van Ruijven (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and a past Pardee Center Visiting Research Fellow), Enrica de Cian (University of Venice) and Ian Sue Wing (BU Department of Earth & Environment and a past Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow). The study was, in part, a product of Prof. Sue Wing’s Faculty Research Fellowship from 2015-2018, during which he hosted van Ruijven for a six-month appointment at the Pardee Center to pursue collaborative research on climate change impacts and on energy transitions in developing countries.
“Whether future warming will cause the demand for energy to increase or decrease is a crucial question,” says Prof. Sue Wing. “If energy use rises and leads to additional emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, increased energy consumption for space conditioning could make it more difficult and costly to mitigate future warming. Quantifying this risk requires understanding how the demand for energy by different types of consumers in different climates will be affected by warming. The results of our study can in the future be used to calculate how energy market dynamics will ultimately determine changes in energy consumption and emissions.”
According to the authors, an important qualification is that the study’s findings represent the initial impacts of global warming. They do not account for the additional adjustments in fuel supplies and prices, and subsequent substitution responses by producers and consumers across the world that impacts will trigger. While these forces are likely to lead to ultimate changes in energy consumption that are less extreme, they also incur adaptation costs that will affect the broader economy and household incomes.
“The lower the level of income per person, the larger the share of income that families need to spend to adapt to a given increase in energy demand,” says van Ruijven, the lead author of the study. “Some scenarios in our study assume continued population growth and in those cases temperature increases by 2050 could expose half a billion people in the lowest-income countries in the Middle-East and Africa to increases in energy demand of 25 percent or higher. The poor face challenges to adaptation that are not only financial — in areas that have unreliable electricity supplies, or lack grid connections altogether, increased exposure to hot days increases the risk of heat-related illnesses and mortality.”
Read the feature story on the study published in BU’s The Brink.