Achieving climate goals

CAETS established a group of engineers to help governments meet climate goals

The Glasgow Climate Agreement, signed by 197 countries at the 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP26), reaffirmed the world's ambition to achieve the goals set by the Paris Climate Agreement to avoid a global climate catastrophe.

The scale and speed of the transition needed to achieve these goals is a major challenge. To meet the targets, the world would need to reduce annual emissions by an additional 28 gigatonnes or 28 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2030, more than has already been pledged under the country-specific unconditional contributions (NDCs)1.

As governments, public authorities at all levels and businesses seek to address this challenge by scaling up and accelerating mitigation and adaptation strategies, engineers and technologists can play an extremely valuable role. In addition to their role of innovation, designing and developing sustainable and resilient solutions, and their professional duty to protect the public and the environment, engineers are trained in systems thinking (analysing multiple overlapping systems to extract appropriate courses of action). This means that they can help policy makers to manage complexity, promote necessary and coordinated change in a wide range of interdependent socio-technical domains, and mitigate unforeseen and unintended negative consequences.

CAETS (the World Federation of Engineering Colleges) is an independent source of solution-oriented expertise that can be used by policy makers around the world to help shape the multidisciplinary approaches needed to respond to this crisis.

CAETS opinion on the climate challenge

Although more than 130 countries have pledged to achieve "net zero" emissions by mid-century2 , recent evidence suggests that the reality of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels may be receding.3 Therefore, swift action and tough choices are needed this decade to decarbonise society and avoid dangerous and irreversible tipping points. Concerted support and major investments must be prioritised to deploy available technologies immediately, rather than relying solely on future research achievements and "magic bullets".

As a policy objective, decarbonisation is unique because of the breadth of policy areas to which it relates and the number of stakeholders that need to be involved in working together towards a common goal. It also needs to be considered in the context of global sustainability as defined by the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These goals can only be achieved through concerted action:

Policy makers, economists, business, investors, social scientists, engineers and other key professions must come together to build on the basic scientific evidence and rapidly implement solutions that are affordable, effective, fair, respectful and inclusive for all.

Global thinking is also essential: to achieve the required results, national decarbonisation strategies need to be designed in a way that enables other countries to make the transition. For example, many countries currently import and export emissions from materials and waste, including many developing countries that have inherited high-emitting goods such as vehicles and machinery from more developed countries.

International cooperation and consideration of the global society as a system are essential to coordinate all actions in order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN SDGs.

Engineering systems approach

Together with other key professions, engineering can make a key contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Engineers have a unique knowledge of transformative technologies, an understanding of the timescales and processes involved in developing, designing and building solutions and, crucially, the ability to think in systems, making them a valuable partner to the bodies charged with implementing the transition to a sustainable future.

The systems approach is used in engineering to solve complex problems and involves the integration of all relevant factors and wider contexts into decision-making processes. This approach has a wide range of applications: for example, it can help policy makers to redesign multiple interconnected socio-technical systems, and help companies to set measurable and verifiable sustainability goals by identifying interdependencies, trade-offs and points of highest impact.

An engineering systems approach can also help to identify which actions should be taken first and which are the best solutions to be implemented and the solutions not to be regretted. For example, this approach can help identify how, when and where best to deploy available technology solutions at scale and faster - essential to accelerate action in the next decade.

The UN SDG climate and sustainable development goals cannot be achieved without engineers. We offer the collective power of CAETS and its ability to bring together resources and expertise from around the world to inform policy and decision makers in their efforts to urgently scale up and accelerate climate change mitigation strategies.

ABOUT CAETS

CAETS is an independent, non-political, non-governmental, international community of engineering academies comprising the best experts in the field from member countries representing 30 major economies. Its objectives include promoting sustainable development and social well-being worldwide.

In September, CAETS brought together the global engineering profession at its annual meeting, The Future of Energy, to discuss a wide range of topics.