The European Union has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions 55% below 1990 levels by 2030, but whether current trends are compatible with this ambition remains uncertain. We apply deep learning to high-resolution socioeconomic and sectoral data across EU27 member states till 2023 to project sectoral CO$_2$ trajectories under current trends, extrapolating observed sectoral momentum without assuming changes in the pace or effectiveness of the policy environment beyond what is already reflected in historical data. We project that EU27 emissions will exceed the 2030 target by 35% (620 Mt CO$_2$ shortfall), with only a small minority of countries on trajectories consistent with the bloc's commitments. While the Power sector achieves target-consistent reductions driven by the renewable transition, Mobility shows minimal progress and accounts for over a third of total emissions by 2030, reflecting a structural inertia across member states rather than geographically concentrated lag. Our findings indicate that substantial additional intervention is required to close Europe's ambition-implementation gap, and call for establishing up-to-date energy information in Europe.
Given recent changes in federal climate policy, the United States is unlikely to meet its original 2030 Paris Agreement emission target of a 50-52% reduction from 2005 levels. However, rapid near-term abatement remains achievable through targeted multi-sector energy transitions. Extending the open-source energy system model, PyPSA-USA, to perform multi-sector analysis, we evaluate the primary drivers of USA energy costs and emissions though applying global sensitivity analysis. Our results suggest that fossil fuel price volatility is the dominant driver of marginal electricity and energy costs across most of the nation, however, uncoordinated state-level renewable mandates can induce localized cost spikes due to regional bottlenecks. We find that system climate impact (CO2e) is overwhelming sensitive to fugitive methane leakage rates and global warming potential assumptions. Addressing upstream methane leaks will play a crucial role in abating climate-related damages. Finally, demand-side electrification, specifically light-duty electric vehicles and service sector heating, can act as immediate levers for carbon abatement. The results of this work suggest that many of the Inflation Reduction Act's clean energy initiatives, that have since been repealed, are effective near-term solutions to reduce exposure to fossil fuel price and mitigate future financial penalties associated with the rising social cost of carbon.
Trevor Barnes, Kamran Tehranchi, Bradley A. Reinholz et al.· 0 citations
Decarbonizing the power sector is central to achieving the Paris Agreement's temperature goals, yet rigorous evidence on whether binding climate commitments actually deliver measurable reductions in electricity-sector emissions remains scarce. This paper asks whether the formal adoption of binding climate commitments reduces power-sector emission intensity in G20 economies, and whether green bond issuance amplifies this effect. We construct an annual panel for 19 G20 countries over 2014-2024, combining satellite-based power-sector CO2 emissions, macroeconomic indicators, hand-coded policy adoption dates, and country-level green bond issuance. Exploiting the staggered adoption of Paris-aligned commitments between 2016 and 2022 as quasi-experimental variation, we apply heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences and event-study estimators. We find that binding climate commitments reduce power-sector emission intensity by approximately 9-12%, with effects emerging immediately at adoption and persisting for at least seven years without significant attenuation. These reductions reflect genuine absolute emission cuts rather than slower GDP growth, providing evidence of strong decoupling in the G20 power sector. By contrast, green bond intensity does not exert a statistically significant incremental effect once policy adoption is accounted for, suggesting that regulatory commitment - rather than labelled financial flows is the primary driver of observed decarbonisation at current scales. Effects are systematically larger in high-income and high-emitting countries. The study offers one of the first post-Paris, sector-specific causal evaluations across the full G20, embeds green finance within a formal policy evaluation framework, and demonstrates the value of modern event-study designs for climate policy analysis.
G. D. Sharma, Liliana Smeich, Aeshna Kharbanda et al.· Journal of Environmental Man...· 0 citations
China emits the most methane of any country worldwide, but there are large uncertainties in recent emissions trends, sources, and the potential impacts of policy actions. This study focuses on a period when the government initiated ambitious methane control efforts, linking sectoral policies with atmospheric evidence on sectoral, sub-national, and seasonal emissions during 2019--2024. We quantify daily methane emissions from China using a regional atmospheric inverse model with TROPOMI satellite observations. Our results reveal an average methane emissions increase rate of 0.3 Tg yr$^{-2}$ in Eastern&Central China, likely a milder trend than in the 2010s. Coal industry methane emissions intensity declined for the first time (-3.2% yr$^{-1}$) despite rising production, possibly associated with diverse policy instruments, mandates, and incentives. We further highlight two emerging challenges for future mitigation: leaks from expanding urban gas use amid the energy transition and rising agricultural emission yet with substantial uncertainty in estimates. Lastly, declining emissions intensity of coal mines points to the future role of targeted mandates and incentives in encouraging methane reduction for other sectors.
Ziting Huang, Ao Chen, Leyang Feng et al.· 0 citations
Achieving the European Union’s (EU-27) 2050 climate neutrality goal requires a drastic reduction in transport emissions. This study utilizes the pymedeas2 integrated assessment model to evaluate trade-offs between technology-led and structure-led transitions under both continuous growth and steady-state economic paradigms. Our results reveal that relying primarily on private vehicle electrification falls short of emission targets. The baseline REF-G scenario—following current institutional roadmaps centred on rapid technological substitution and sustained economic growth—maintains a high final energy demand and requires a cumulative extraction of 2.35 Mt of lithium by 2050, claiming nearly 6.4% of current global proven reserves solely for European mobility. Conversely, combining a modal shift toward electrified rail with macroeconomic stabilization (RAIL-SSE) reduces transport final energy demand by 68% relative to the projected 2024 peak and decreases lithium requirements by 57%. This sufficiency-driven pathway achieves the deepest absolute climate mitigation, dropping residual transport emissions to approximately 90 MtCO2/year. Furthermore, despite the front-loaded costs of rail expansion, RAIL-SSE emerges as the least capital-intensive pathway, requiring a total investment of USD 19.83 trillion—a systemic saving of USD 7.27 trillion relative to the REF-G baseline. We conclude that reaching absolute sustainability in the EU transport sector necessitates a policy shift away from resource-intensive green growth strategies toward demand sufficiency and durable public infrastructure.
Enric Alcover Comas, Pau Martínez Marín, R. Samsó et al.· Sustainability· 0 citations
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed in 2024 to boost finance for climate change in developing countries to USD 300 billion by 2035. In this study, we assess how much mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is possible by generating this amount of revenues from carbon pricing in industrialized regions. We assess a scenario that considers carbon prices differentiated for industrialized, transition and developing regions. We find that such scenario provides 16% more GHG emissions reductions by 2035 compared to a scenario where the existing national mitigation targets (represented by the nationally determined contributions as of 2022) are achieved. Despite this, a considerable gap remains in terms of the revenues needed to achieve emissions reductions aligned with a pathway securing the climate target of 1.5 °C global warming above pre-industrial levels. Therefore, these outcomes suggest that considerably larger climate mitigation actions are needed beyond the climate finance goal agreed by nations under the UNFCCC. In addition, we highlight by means of additional scenarios the implications (in terms of emissions reductions, carbon price revenues and consumption losses) of the absence in the carbon pricing scheme of the major GHG emitters from industrialized regions (USA) and from developing regions (China).
D. Herran, S. Fujimori, Osamu Nishiura· Environmental Research Lette...· 0 citations
Addressing climate change with the necessary urgency will only be successful if climate policies are perceived as socially fair and equitable by the majority of the population. However, as recognised in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), energy and climate modelling still struggles to bring together detailed economic and inequality impacts of climate policies. To help reduce this gap, we link GCAM-Europe, a geographical expansion of a well-established integrated assessment model, with MEDUSA, a tool for high-resolution distributional analysis. Our analysis explores how different implementations of the European Union (EU)‘s climate policy portfolio affect various consumer groups across and within Member States. It finds that a general EU-wide carbon price, while cost-efficient, has regressive impacts, disproportionately burdening low-income Member States and households. In contrast, policies based on national plans (NECPs) are less regressive. Gender and the urban-rural dimension also play an important role, with man-headed and rural households being the most affected.
E. Alonso-Epelde, X. García-Muros, Jon Sampedro et al.· npj Climate Action· 0 citations
