Paris Agreement requires substantial, broad, and sustained engagements beyond COVID-19 public stimulus packages

TL;DR

Achieving the Paris Agreement's long-term climate goals requires ongoing, substantial investments beyond immediate COVID-19 stimulus efforts, emphasizing the need for persistent low-carbon investments and improved modeling of policy impacts.

Contribution

This paper highlights the necessity of sustained, broad investments beyond COVID-19 stimulus packages and calls for better modeling tools to assess their impact on climate goals.

Findings

COVID-19 stimulus packages alone are insufficient for long-term climate targets.

Existing IAM databases are inadequate for analyzing public spending effects.

Long-term low-carbon investments must be scaled up and maintained.

Abstract

It has been claimed that COVID-19 public stimulus packages could be sufficient to meet the short-term energy investment needs to leverage a shift toward a pathway consistent with the 1.5 degrees C target of the Paris Agreement. Here we provide complementary perspectives to reiterate that substantial, broad, and sustained engagements beyond stimulus packages will be needed for achieving the Paris Agreement long-term targets. Low-carbon investments will need to scale up and persist over the next several decades following short-term stimulus packages. The required total energy investments in the real world can be larger than the currently available estimates from Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). Existing databases from IAMs are not sufficient for analyzing the effect of public spending on emission reduction. To inform what role COVID-19 stimulus packages and public investments may play for reaching the Paris Agreement targets, explicit modelling of such policies is required.