Ratcheting up Brazil´s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC)

This webinar will explore Brazil’s role in global efforts to address climate change. How will this country contribute to the Paris Agreement’s mitigation goals? Which roles will play agriculture, forestry, land use, biofuels, electrifications of vehicles, carbon capture and storage?

Relying on both COFFEE (global) and BLUES (national) Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to produce emissions scenarios for Brazil for the 2010-2050 period, we present different mitigation scenarios pinpointing the key interplay between the AFOLU (Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use) and the energy sectors and suggesting that trade-offs between land-based mitigation and biofuels production are likely to present challenges.

But what stands out is the role to be played by BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage) and biofuels, and the electrification of the light-duty vehicle (LDV) fleet. In more stringent scenarios the introduction of electric vehicles leads to sharp increases in electricity consumption, impacting the power sector, changing biofuels production and affecting the agricultural sector. Such shifts lead to different near-term developments for these sectors in different scenarios, showing, for example, that a 1.5º C emissions pathway is not simply a continuation of a 2º C trajectory, nor a 2º C trajectory a more ambitious NDC scenario into the future. In other words, stringent climate mitigation cannot simply be seen as more of the same.

Focusing on the NDC horizon of 2030 misses the sharp increase in BECCS needed post-2030 to keep emissions from rising, and leads to technological lock-ins incompatible with a necessary post-2030 ratcheting up process, which requires rapid electrification of the LDV fleet, and reduced ethanol for LDVs. In that case, biofuels production with BECCS will have to be re-directed to other uses, such as synthetic fuels, chemicals and even power generation and ethanol buses.

Presenter: Roberto Schaeffer – Energy Planning Program, COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Moderator: Enrica De Cian – CMCC@ Ca’Foscari