On 26 February 2020, the Centre for Climate and Energy Policy convened a discussion between experts and stakeholders on Australia’s national 2050 emissions strategy. Climateworks CEO Anna Skarbek joined Investor Group on Climate Change’s Erwin Jackson, Australian Industry Group’s Tennant Reed, and ANU’s Professor Nerilie Abram and Professor Frank Jotzo.

ClimateWork’s Anna Skarbek presented some of the key findings from Decarbonisation Futures outlining the progress that has been made in the five years since the release of Deep Decarbonisation Pathways for Australia.

Technology

“The four pillars of decarbonisation still hold. What has improved is some of the technologies that were not considered known and proven when we looked at it five years ago now are in the mix in a way that they weren’t.”

Buildings

“Our data shows that energy use in buildings can halve per square meter, with technologies that are already available. So the question there is deployment. How do you roll that out in what is quite a fragmented asset replacement task?”

Transport

“In transport, there’s been a lot of progress on the technological front. And so now for road transport, which is where 80 per cent of Australia’s transport emissions are roughly half passenger half freight on that road share, another 10 per cent is aviation and a tenth everything else. Electrification is now viable in all of those realms. In a way it wasn’t even for short haul aviation.”

Industry

“There are very emerging areas of technological progress in the circular economy. That will affect demand for raw materials, especially when the trend is global, which is something we model in one of the scenarios which affects what we export. “

Pathways

“The key lesson out of all of this is whilst the technology is there, the pace of uptake significantly accelerates, really significantly, in the scenarios where we get it right and we deploy these technologies at the volumes we would need to stay under the emissions trajectories “

You can watch the full panel discussion below: