ALBERT

Description: Indonesia is among the countries with the largest planned coal power capacity additions worldwide, thereby posing a substantial challenge for global climate change mitigation goals. To understand the underlying political drivers, we carry out expert interviews and examine how individual actors and their objectives, as well as the country context influence energy policy formulation. We find that under President Joko Widodo, energy policy formulation has been driven by the development of public infrastructure, while securing popularity for the presidential election in 2019. State-owned enterprises represent a source of political patronage and are employed to achieve those goals. Diminishing export markets have incentivized the politically well-connected and highly concentrated Indonesian coal industry to lobby for the construction of coal-fired power plants in order to raise domestic demand. There is also a strong incentive to sustain coal mining as a key economic activity, as associated royalties significantly contribute to local and national public budgets. Local pollution and climate change mitigation are of low priority. Despite the government’s documented awareness of the energy sector as the biggest contributor to future emissions, climate protection is narrowly framed as a forestry and land-use issue.

Description: Economic development in sub-Saharan Africa has increased carbon emissions and will continue to do so. However, changes in emissions in the past few decades and their underlying drivers are not well understood. Here we use a Kaya decomposition to show that rising carbon intensity has played an increasingly important role in emission growth in sub-Saharan Africa since 2005. These changes have mainly been driven by the increasing use of oil, especially in the transportation sector. Combining investment data in the power sector with economic and population projections, we find that investments in new coal-fired capacity may become a major driver of future carbonization. Our results highlight the importance of making low-carbon technologies available and financially attractive to sub-Saharan African countries to avoid a lock-in of emission-intensive energy use patterns.

Description: Phasing out coal requires expanding the notion of a ‘just transition’ and a roadmap that specifies the sequence of coal plant retirement, the appropriate policy instruments as well as ways to include key stakeholders in the process.

Description: Eine kohärente Klimaaußenpolitik (KAP) Deutschlands ist essentiell für das Gelingen sowohl der nationalen und europäischen Energiewende als auch für die effektive Unterstützung ambitionierter Klimapolitik außerhalb der Europäischen Union. Ziel dieses Ariadne- Hintergrundpapiers ist es, einen Diskussionsbeitrag zur Strukturierung der Debatte um die Eckpunkte und Optionen zur Ausarbeitung und Weiterentwicklung der deutschen KAP-Strategie zu leisten. Dazu werden vier Kategorien relevanter Ziele unterschieden. Diese reichen von klassischen klimapolitischen Zielen über industriepolitische sowie sicherheits- und handelspolitische Ziele hin zu breiteren außenpolitischen Zielen. Für jedes Ziel müssen entsprechende Mittel identifiziert werden, mit denen es erreicht werden kann, und Barrieren, die ihm im Weg stehen und entsprechend bedacht werden müssen. Für die Charakterisierung und Analyse verschiedener Mittel werden fünf Kategorien vorgeschlagen. Eine zentrale, aber in der Bewertung konzeptionell und empirisch herausfordernde Kategorie ist dabei das Transformationspotenzial einer Maßnahme. Im Fall von Zielkonflikten und begrenzten Ressourcen müssen Ziele priorisiert werden. Wir skizzieren dafür einen analytischen Rahmen und diskutieren illustrativ mögliche Optionen zur strategischen Gesamtausrichtung. Diese umfassen zum einen KAP-Gesamtstrategien von Staaten gegenüber allen anderen Ländern, und zum anderen Strategien für spezifische Staaten (z.B. die deutsche Strategie für den Umgang mit Indien oder Südafrika). Dabei können Strategien in einem Kontinuum von maximaler Priorisierung von Klimazielen (Klimapolitik First) bis hin zur nachrangigen Behandlung (Klimapolitik als Mittel zum Zweck) verortet und entsprechend ausgestaltet werden. Neben den Inhalten der Strategie werden Fragen der Organisation und Koordination in der Entwicklung und Implementierung der KAP-Strategie in den Blick genommen und die nächsten Schritte diskutiert. Eine erfolgreiche KAP-Strategie sollte dabei von Beginn an zwischen zentralen Stakeholdern im In- und Ausland in jeweils geeigneten Formaten erarbeitet, implementiert und im Sinne eines Lernprozesses fortlaufend angepasst werden. Eine KAP sollte sich in die breitere Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik Deutschlands einfügen, da relevante Politikfelder auf verschiedenen Ebenen eng miteinander verbunden sind. Bei der Erarbeitung der neuen KAP-Strategie der Bundesregierung sollte dazu insbesondere auf Kohärenz zur deutschen Sicherheits- und der Chinastrategie geachtet werden. 2 Grundlage der Strategieentwicklung ist die Klärung möglicher Ziele und Mittel der deutschen KAP und ihrer Wechselwirkungen miteinander. Eine KAP-Strategie muss durch Analysen zu Umsetzbarkeit und Kosten, politischen Wi-derständen und Zielkonflikten informiert sein und die normativen Vorgaben der deut-schen Außenpolitik berücksichtigen.

Description: The construction of new coal-fired power plants is frequently financed by banks from abroad. Recent studies suggest that the opportunity to export technology is a relevant 'push factor' for such financing activities. In this paper, we provide first quantitative evidence for this hypothesis on a global scale. We construct a novel dataset that tracks both public and private financial involvement on a coal unit level, including information on equipment manufacturers and service providers. The findings indicate that financial institutions from various countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, and Western nations provide loans to coal units overseas. These finance flows, particularly from publicly owned banks, are accompanied by technology exports from the same country. Complementing our quantitative analysis with semi-structured interviews, we find indications that political economy factors, such as public banks' requirement for participation of domestic firms in financing deals and the unlocking of export business opportunities for domestic industries in financing countries, contribute to this correlation. Our findings highlight the importance of financing countries and their domestic industries for low-carbon transitions globally.

Description: To comply with international climate targets, India will eventually need to phase out coal-fired power plants and substantially increase the use of solar-PV and wind power. Winners and losers of this transformation will not be distributed equally across the country, which potentially holds severe implications for the feasibility of the transformation. In an effort to understand political economy constraints from adversely impacted key societal groups, we discuss how Indian states would be affected in terms of distributional implications for households, industrial competitiveness and employment. We examine the effects of phasing-out of energy subsidies and carbon pricing (USD 40 per ton CO2) on household incomes. We likewise analyze employment effects of ramping-up renewables and phasing-out of coal-fired power plants. Finally, we assess the impacts of carbon pricing on key industries. Our findings suggest that adverse impacts are strongly concentrated in Eastern, less wealthy, coal- mining states, which would face employment losses with pressure on poor households and energy intensive industries. Employment creation through deployment of renewables would, however, be more dispersed across India's Western and Central states. Complementary policies, such as recycling carbon tax revenues, will be necessary to avoid deepening regional disparities and increase acceptance from adversely impacted regions.

Description: A rapid phase-out of unabated coal use is essential to limit global warming to below 2°C. This review presents a comprehensive assessment of coal transitions in mitigation scenarios consistent with the Paris Agreement, using data from more than 1500 publicly available scenarios generated by more than 30 integrated assessment models. Our ensemble analysis uses clustering techniques to categorize coal transition pathways in models and bridges evidence on technological learning and innovation with historical data of energy systems. Six key findings emerge: First, we identify three archetypal coal transitions within Paris-consistent mitigation pathways. About 38% of scenarios are ‘coal phase out’ trajectories and rapidly reduce coal consumption to near zero. ‘Coal persistence’ pathways (42%) reduce coal consumption much more gradually and incompletely. The remaining 20% follow ‘coal resurgence’ pathways, characterised by increased coal consumption in the second half of the century.. Second, coal persistence and resurgence archetypes rely on the widespread availability and rapid scale-up of carbon capture and storage technology (CCS). Third, coal-transition archetypes spread across all levels of climate policy ambition and scenario cycles, reflecting their dependence on model structures and assumptions. Fourth, most baseline scenarios – including the shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) - show much higher coal dependency compared to historical observations over the last 60 years. Fifth, coal-transition scenarios consistently incorporate very optimistic assumptions about the cost and scalability of CCS technologies, while being pessimistic about the cost and scalability of renewable energy technologies. Sixth, evaluation against coal-dependent baseline scenarios suggests that many mitigation scenarios overestimate the technical difficulty and costs of coal phase- outs. To improve future research, we recommend using up-to-date cost data and evidence about innovation and diffusion dynamics of different groups of zero or low-carbon technologies. Revised SSP quantifications need to incorporate projected technology learning and consistent cost structures, while reflecting recent trends in coal consumption.