Eight years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the international community will gather at COP28 in Dubai and conclude the first Global Stocktake to gauge progress in limiting global temperature increases to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. The need to understand what kind of climate future the world is on track for has become increasingly important not just for diplomats and policymakers, but to almost every actor of the global economy. These policy-takers need access to an outlook that incorporates uncertainty in factors over which they have no control—variables like policy, fuel prices, and economic growth. The newly launched Rhodium Climate Outlook strives to provide this kind of information, with detailed data on how the global energy transition, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and temperatures are likely to evolve given current policy and technology trends, but absent a major acceleration in climate policy and clean technology innovation.
The Rhodium Climate Outlook (RCO) seeks to address some of the shortcomings of existing modeling with probabilistic energy, emissions, and temperature projections of use to a wide range of global stakeholders, including policy-takers. We’ve done this by incorporating the following innovations, which to our knowledge have never been combined in a single modeling platform:
- Probabilistic global emissions projections that capture uncertainty in economic and population growth, oil and gas prices, and clean energy technology costs.
- An econometrically-based policy projection module that uses evidence of the determinants of climate policy around the world over the past two decades to provide probabilistic projections for how policy is likely to evolve going forward.
- Projections for all GHG emissions, not just CO2.
- Probabilistic temperature projections derived directly from our emissions projections but including climate system uncertainty as well.
Each year, the Rhodium Climate Outlook will provide an updated look at what the world is on track for given a wide range of developments that impact our key variables. As we narrow down uncertainty, add emerging technologies that have reached sufficient maturity, and incorporate new policies as they become adopted, we hope to see the outlook for global emissions and temperature rise improve. In the years ahead, the RCO will be an important barometer to assess what really matters, where the world must focus, and how our efforts are paying off.
Contact
For access to the ClimateDeck and bulk data access, please email us at climatedeck@rhg.com.
About Rhodium Group
Rhodium Group is a leading independent research provider, combining economic data and policy insight to analyze global trends. Rhodium’s Energy & Climate practice analyzes the effects of policy and market developments on energy systems and greenhouse gas emissions, and provides actionable information about the risks of climate change by sector and region around the world. This interdisciplinary group of policy experts, economic analysts, energy modelers, data engineers, and climate scientists supports decision-makers in the public, financial services, corporate, philanthropic and nonprofit sectors. More information is available at www.rhg.com.
About the ClimateDeck
All of the underlying data from the Rhodium Climate Outlook is available to explore and download for free from the ClimateDeck platform, a partnership of Rhodium Group and Breakthrough Energy. This free data visualization platform includes breakdowns of our results by gas, fuel type, region and sector as well as underlying energy and technology data and enables users to explore datasets through user-friendly visualizations and tailor them to different scenarios and comparisons by adjusting inputs such as timeframe, geography, sector, gas and uncertainty ranges. The adjustable datasets can be exported as production-ready visualizations and as CSV files. Users are encouraged to integrate ClimateDeck data in their own analysis and external publications, with attribution to Rhodium Group.