Scientific achievements

ENE research activities were focused on:

• Successful completion of the narratives of the SSPs and continued coordination and development of related scenarios
• Completion of major studies assessing strategies for achieving universal energy access to clean and modern energy for the poor
• Improving energy security regionally and globally
• Eradicating adverse health and ecosystem impacts of energy-related air pollution
• Assessment of the Durban Platform in the context of the 2°C climate target and the role of short-lived climate forcers in reaching the target
• Methodological developments, for example, improved representation of energy technology diffusion in integrated assessment models; better understanding of behavioral and soft factors for energy technology choices; and new concepts for projecting inequality and income heterogeneity
• Scientific networking and policy advice in 2014 focusing on the 2014 GAP report of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Secretary-General’s Initiative Sustainable Energy for All (SE4All), and contributions to the Summary for Policymakers of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, Working Groups I, III, and the Synthesis Report).

Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)

The Energy (ENE) Program coordinated a number of major research community activities, in particular the further development of quantitative scenarios for the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which form part of the new framework adopted by the climate change research community to facilitate the integrated analysis of climate impacts, vulnerabilities, adaptation, and mitigation. More

Assessment of the Durban Platform and the 2°C target

The Energy (ENE) Program in collaboration with its main partners successfully completed the LIMITS project, a multi-year research effort on assessing the climate policy implications of the Durban Platform for enhanced action on climate change. More

Short-lived climate forcers and air pollution

The Energy (ENE) Program’s Joeri Rogelj led a study that explored and quantified the interactions and uncertainties of reductions of emissions of short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs) and carbon dioxide, that resulted in two publications. More

Energy and Human Development

The Energy (ENE) Program made important strides in advancing the state of knowledge on energy poverty, the policy costs of expanding universal access to modern energy worldwide, and the synergies and tradeoffs between achieving universal access and other sustainable development goals. More

Energy security

The work of the Energy (ENE) Program on energy security focuses on how energy security is framed as a policy issue in different political contexts and interacts with other energy policy objectives. More

Energy investments

Energy (ENE) Program researchers found that mitigating climate change will require substantial new investment in low-carbon energy and energy efficiency over the coming decades and that if policymakers are slow to respond to this challenge in the next few years, they risk “locking in” fossil-based energy infrastructure that will likely need to be shut down before the end of its useful life. More

Abundant gas

Energy Program (ENE) researchers, IIASA partners, and international collaborators contributed to new research on unconventional natural gas, the results of which were published in Nature. More

Income inequality and heterogeneity

The Energy (ENE) Program contributed to a cross-cutting collaborative research project by developing projections of future national income distributions. More

Transport behavior modeling

Within the context of the FP7 ADVANCE project David McCollum expanded and enriched the end-use detail of the MESSAGE-Transport model (MESSAGE extension) by incorporating utility-based consumer choice decisions in the light-duty vehicle sector. More

Technology diffusion

The endogenous model formulation for technology diffusion constraints was further refined and parameterized to improve the representation of technological change in integrated assessment models (IAMs) and thereby inform climate policy choices. More

IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

Seven resident scientists from the Transitions to New Technologies (TNT) Program served as Lead and Contributing Authors, Editors, or Review Editors on the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). More

Last edited: 29 April 2015