India's CO2 emissions pathways to 2050 - Grantham Report 5

Project Lead: Ajay Gambhir and Dr Gabrial Anandarajah
Project Team: Dr Tamaryn Napp, Christopher Emmott, Lola Vallejo
Published: January 2013

Overview

This study, which combines work by the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and the Energy Institute at University College London, outlines potential pathways to 2050 for India to reduce its energy- and industry-related CO₂ emissions in line with international efforts to avoid dangerous levels of global warming. It explores three scenarios:

• A reference scenario with no future CO^₂ emissions constraint (in this scenario, India’s emissions increase from just below 2 GtCO^₂ in 2010 to almost 8 GtCO^₂ in 2050);
• A first low-carbon scenario with an emissions constraint of about 2.4 GtCO^₂ by 2050, equating to about 1.3 tCO^₂ per capita (and about 2 tCO^₂e per capita by 2050 in terms of all greenhouse gases), as part of a global CO₂ limit of 12 GtCO₂ by 2050, and the same per capita level of CO^₂. The global greenhouse gas emissions pathway from which this limit is derived has an approximately 50% chance of achieving a 2 degrees C limit to global warming
• A second low-carbon scenario, with the same 2050 emissions target as the first, but with certain technology parameters (constraints and investment hurdle rates) specified to account for a range of Indian energy experts’ views on possible energy and technology developments in India.

The TIAM-UCL model used in this study is an integrated assessment model representing 16 different regions of the world, including a distinct India region. For each region, energy service demands are projected using socio-economic drivers, and the model determines a cost-optimal level of deployment of energy end-use and energy conversion technologies and resources to meet the energy service demands. Final energy demands depend on energy end-use technology efficiencies and primary energy demands depend on conversion efficiencies and losses.

This study was undertaken as part of the AVOID 1 programme on avoiding dangerous climate change (see www.avoid.uk.net for details).