Dr. Rachael Jonassen, an associate research professor in sustainable urban planning at GW and director of climate change and greenhouse gas management at GW’s Environmental & Energy Management Institute.
On Monday, April 4, the Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its report, the final report due out as part of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. The Working Group III report focuses on mitigation of climate change, assessing way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and removing greenhouse gases from Earth’s atmosphere.
Rachel Jonassen is an associate research professor in sustainable urban planning at the George Washington University and the director of climate change and greenhouse gas management at GW’s Environmental & Energy Management Institute. Her expertise includes, among other things, climate change science and risk, greenhouse gas mitigation, hydroclimatology, science policy and displacement as a result of climate change.
Dr. Jonassen offered the following statement:
“Cities are the key to climate change mitigation. Most emissions come from cities—this is true in nearly all countries. Moreover, a few big cities worldwide are responsible for the majority of city emissions worldwide.
Consumption drives city emissions, and most cities produce far more emissions with the goods they import and consume than with the goods they produce internally. This problem of consumption as a driver of emissions will only grow as individual wealth around the world grows.
Moreover, only a small percentage of cities worldwide have a complete picture of their own emissions, which limits their ability to set and track reduction targets. Yet, emerging big data methods can help cities not only identify emission sources within city boundaries but also track reductions of those sources.
Stronger policies are also needed to facilitate a quicker shift toward renewable energy sources. The cost of solar and wind are still too high to compete with fossil fuels, and the difficulty of scaling up the supply of raw materials needed for mitigation—such as for solar panels and batteries—is becoming a barrier to expanding their use and putting stress on source countries while leading to intense competition.
Hydrogen—as an energy storage medium, a means of transporting energy, and a high-density energy source—is one of the big surprises to emerge since the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report as a means to reduce emissions. Likewise, the explosive growth of the voluntary carbon market is an underappreciated tool for transferring technical and financial support to developing countries.”
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