International Energy Agency Scenarios

The World Energy Outlook (WEO) of the International Energy Agency (IEA) also uses scenarios to examine future energy trends from a global energy and climate model. The scenarios highlight the importance of public policies in the future of the energy system but also bring other elements and influences, such as economic aspects and demographic context, technology and learning costs, energy prices and accessibility, corporate sustainability, and social and behavioral factors.

The 2022 edition of WEO brought updates on the current and long-term scenarios for global energy markets, indicating how the energy system can respond to and evolve to the current global crisis (IEA, 2022).

Steps

Stated Policies Scenario APS

Announced Pledges Scenario

It reflects existing policies and measures under development in each sector and indicates where the energy system can go without further intervention by public policymakers.

The current WEO 2022 scenario indicates a rupture in the historically observed relationship between GDP growth and emissions growth.

It considers all climate pledges made by governments worldwide, including Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), as well as long-term net zero targets. It assumes that they will be met in full and on time, maintaining, with a probability of 50%, the temperature increase in 2100 around 1.7ºC.

It is the closest scenario in certain aspects to the Sustainable Development Scenario (SDS), a scenario used in previous editions of the WEO to model a trajectory below 2ºC and discontinued in the 2022 edition. Its results also show adherence to those modeled in the SDS scenario, especially concerning the global temperature increase.

In the APS scenario, countries committed to net zero goals make efforts to minimize emissions from oil and gas operations, increasing production costs. Projects with lower costs and lower emissions are the least affected.

NZE Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario

Normative scenario describing an ambitious trajectory for the global energy sector to achieve net zero CO2 emissions by 2050, indicating a roadmap to achieve that goal. This vision also addresses the key United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to energy, in particular, universal access to energy by 2030.

On the proposed trajectory, global temperature peaks below 1.6°C around 2040, before dropping to around 1.4°C by 2100.