The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today released the 3rd and final part of the 5th Assessment report: Mitigation of Climate Change. The full report, Summary for Policy Makers, and supporting materials is at www.mitigation2014.org

This landmark report embeds state-of-the-art modelling of long term decarbonisation pathways within an expert meta-review and analysis on the best peer reviewed literature. Professor Neil Strachan, University College London’s Energy Institute and lead investigator of the wholeSEM consortium was a lead author of Chapter 7 on Energy Systems.

Professor Strachan said “This IPCC report shows the scale of the challenge to mitigate climate change in the current context of accelerating emissions of greenhouse gases which if it remains unchecked could lead to long term temperature rises of around 4°C.” He went on to say “There is good news in the report on the improvement in new technologies and the assessment of their overall potential throughout the energy supply, buildings and transport sectors, as well as the range of policy initiatives enacted by countries across the world. However the scale of the challenges to limit climate change to acceptable risk levels is daunting and relies on massive redirection of energy investment, the success of key low carbon energy technologies, the recognition of the critical role of energy demand reduction, and the setting up of new institutions to coordinate such a transition.”

He concluded, “This is a global problem that we can solve at manageable costs, but this requires us all to quickly commit to meaningful pricing levels of GHG emissions, decadal investments in innovation, and removal of market barriers to enable behavioural change”.