Japan's long-term climate mitigation policy: Multi-model assessment and sectoral challenges

Masahiro Sugiyama, Shinichiro Fujimori, Kenichi Wada, Seiya Endo, Yasumasa Fujii, Ryoichi Komiyama, Etsushi Kato, Atsushi Kurosawa, Yuhji Matsuo, Ken Oshiro, Fuminori Sano and Hiroto Shiraki

Energy, 2019, vol. 167, issue C, 1120-1131

Abstract: Japan is the sixth largest greenhouse gas emitter in 2016 and plays an important role to attain the long-term climate goals of the Paris Agreement. One of the key policy issues in Japan's energy and environmental policy arena is the energy system transition to achieve 80% emissions reduction in 2050, a current policy goal set in 2016. To contribute to the ongoing policy debate, this paper focuses on energy-related CO2 emissions and analyzes such decarbonization scenarios that are consistent with the government goals. We employ six energy-economic and integrated assessment models to reveal decarbonization challenges in the energy system. The modeling results show that Japan's mitigation scenarios are characterized by high marginal costs of abatement. They also suggest that the industrial sector is likely to have a large final energy share and significant residual emissions under the 80% reduction scenario, though it is generally thought that the transport sector would have large decarbonization challenges. The present findings imply that not only energy policy but also industrial policy may be relevant to the long-term environmental target. Given the high marginal costs exceeding those of negative emissions technologies that could place a cost ceiling, further model development would be crucial.

Keywords: Climate change mitigation; Model intercomparison project; Sectoral mitigation; Energy scenarios (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218320814
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:167:y:2019:i:c:p:1120-1131

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2018.10.091

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().