Calculated climate success
Extra funding for the development of DECC’s successful international 2050 calculator project.
Speaking at a Global Calculator discussion event at the Grand Palais in Paris, the Department of Energy and Climate Change Minister Lord Bourne announced that an extra £300,000 will be given to support the development of DECC’s successful international 2050 calculator project.
This funding will be used to further improve 2050 models in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and South Africa. In addition, a conference will be held to share DECC’s experiences and insight with other countries around the world.
Lord Bourne said:
The 2050 Calculator is a simple idea, but one that is very powerful.
The Global Calculator takes this powerful idea worldwide, giving everyone access to the data about climate solutions.
Not just university professors but governments, charities, schoolchildren and businesses.
The 2050 calculator approach – pioneered in the UK – has proved to be an important tool for informing the climate debate and making policy more evidence based.
The 2050 calculator was first developed to model UK emissions and is an open-source online platform that enables anyone to understand the options for hitting UK emission targets set out in the 2008 Climate Change Act.
The UK Government has gone on to share the national 2050 calculator model with other countries, and around 30 are now working on their own models. DECC has funded 10 of these in developing countries through the International Climate Fund.
The event at the Grand Palais featured the newly developed Global Calculator, which DECC developed with Climate-KIC and experts from around the world. It provides a way to model the world’s energy, land and food systems, allowing the user to explore the options for reducing global emissions to 2050, and to see the climate consequences of these choices to 2100.
The purpose of the event was to generate a discussion about the business opportunities and challenges we face to tackle climate change and was hosted by Eliot Whittington, Deputy Director, The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group and panellist Joanna Yarrow, Head of Sustainability, IKEA UK & Ireland.