Climate mitigation scenarios ‘reproduce colonial inequalities’ until 2100

A just energy transition that keeps global warming below 2 degrees Celsius would require wealthy countries in the North to reduce their energy use to sustainable levels of consumption, while allowing for a sufficient growth in energy use in the rest of the world, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC’s existing climate mitigation scenarios, however, do not solve structural energy imbalance, researchers say in a new study published in Lancet Planetary Health. 

“Instead of including scenarios which explore a fair and just transition, they reproduce colonial inequalities well into the future,” the study argues.

The scientific study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) was conducted by researchers Jason Hickel and Aljosa Slamersak, who call for the development of new climate mitigation scenarios that would achieve energy convergence between the Global North and the Global South, and thus gradually eradicate the energy privilege of rich countries.

The authors argue that a just transition requires reducing energy use in wealthy countries to achieve rapid emissions reductions while ensuring sufficient energy for development in the rest of the world.

A just transition along those lines, however, is not represented among the climate mitigation scenarios reviewed by the IPCC, which are often used to guide decision-making. Instead, existing scenarios tend to maintain the North’s energy privilege at extremely high levels.

The study emphasises that the world’s wealthiest 5 percent use more energy than the poorest half of the global population combined. In contrast, more than 3 billion people in the poorest countries live in energy poverty, and 780 million people do not have access to electricity.

Countries from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the rest of Europe on average use about 130 gigajoules of energy per capita each year, nearly ten times more than what low-income countries use.

“Much of this excess energy is consumed by forms of production that support corporate profits and elite accumulation, such as fast fashion, sports utility vehicles, industrial meat and planned obsolesce, which have no relevance to wellbeing,” emphasises Slamersak.

African and Middle Eastern countries are assumed to have their energy use limited at their existing rates for most of the century at less than 30 gigajoules per capita per year. By contrast, OECD countries and the rest of Europe are on average allocated energy in excess of 100 gigajoules per capita per year for the rest of the century.

Even with the increase in energy use in Asia and Latin America, their consumption amounts to barely half of what countries in the Global North consume in 2100.

In existing mitigation scenarios, the North’s energy privilege is sustained by suppressing energy use in the South and by betting on speculative negative emissions schemes like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

BECCS scenarios suggest that the Global North can continue to use high rates of energy and emit carbon, so long as emissions can be pulled back out of the atmosphere in the future.

But bioenergy is appropriated overwhelmingly from land in the Global South, and the “additional energy” that is made available in BECCS-heavy scenarios is allocated overwhelmingly to the Global North rather than the South, “thus maintaining or further widening global energy inequities,” Hickel and Slamersak said.

“Moreover, these scenarios typically assume that the bulk of negative emissions will be realised by the biomass-rich countries of the Global South, with their cropland and natural ecosystems diverted to energy crop plantations,” they add.

Ultimately, the researchers determined that the IPCC scenarios reviewed were “neither morally acceptable nor politically tenable”.

Instead, low-income countries “should be granted access to the finance and technology necessary to deploy modern renewable energy systems sufficient to provide decent living for all, and they should have the freedom to organise energy use and economic capacity around meeting national needs.”

“The planet is finite and should be shared fairly,” the study concludes.