A net zero society: scenarios and pathways
Published 10 November 2021
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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/net-zero-society-scenarios-and-pathways/a-net-zero-society-scenarios-and-pathways
Overview
The UK government is committed to achieving net zero by 2050, requiring a reduction in UK net greenhouse gas emissions of 100% relative to their levels in 1990. Achieving net zero will be as much a societal challenge as it is a technical one. Societal norms, practices and behaviours will play a significant role in emissions reduction, but these are uncertain and likely to change in the future. We can’t therefore rely on assumptions based on present trends in planning for net zero.
Project outline and objectives
This Foresight project aims to support the resilience of government net zero policies by understanding how different social and behavioural changes will affect our path to net zero. This will help inform the government’s long-term net zero strategy, enable stress-testing of policies and assumptions against plausible societal futures, and support more effective and resilient policy.
The project will achieve this by providing the evidence and tools to help understand how behaviours could impact net zero. It will examine trend data on behaviours that drive energy demand and emissions, explore how they may change in the future, and then develop holistic socio-technical scenarios that consider potential impacts of changes in both society and technology. This will help explore critical inter-dependencies, trade-offs, and indirect effects of potential shifts in different pathways to net zero.
Project outputs
This project will produce several core outputs, including an expert evidence review, a set of future scenarios exploring different assumptions of future societal and behavioural change, and modelling to quantify implications of each scenario for the energy system and for different groups within society. The final report will present these findings along with the likely trade-offs and spill-over effects of each scenario. We will also develop a guide on how to use these outputs for policy teams in government.
Project timeline
This project is due to run until late 2022 when the final report is published.
Contact: contact@go-science.gov.uk