Energy Transition Outlook 2020: A global and regional forecast to 2050
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to exact a tragic toll on lives and livelihoods and will greatly impact global energy use in the near term. Energy demand will fall 8% this year, and with a slow recovery, our whole energy demand forecast is rebased downwards by 8% relative to our previous forecast through to 2050. The pandemic has also brought forward peak emissions and will lead to an earlier plateauing of oil use. But that is not doing much, unfortunately, to advance the pace of decarbonisation. Solutions exist to meet the Paris Agreement, including hydrogen, CCS and further energy-efficiency improvements, but these need a significant policy push to scale. The world will need to achieve the same percentage of emissions reduction seen in 2020 every year through to 2050 to succeed in reaching the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. So, we urgently need to find more sustainable and lasting ways to reduce emissions. Some subsectors are well under-way, like wind, solar PV and EVs; but we must also urgently tackle those areas, like heavy industry and long-distance transport, where emissions are hard to abate.
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