The Paris Agreement and Climate Change Countermeasure Technologies

Knowledge of climate change research has influenced international politics. The Kyoto Protocol in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change obliges developed economic parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while the Paris Agreement requests all parties to join the reduction framework. Climate change countermeasure technology is categorized into mitigation, adaptation, and climate engineering. Research organizations internationally have analyzed mitigation scenarios such as new energy technology feasibility and greenhouse gas emission pathways utilizing integrated assessment models. An inventory of model results contributed meta-analyses in the fifth assessment reports of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Consideration of the energy system should include viewpoints of both supply and demand. For example, the net zero energy building is proposed as a new concept in which net annual energy consumption of a building is almost zero; and this could lead to zero emission in the building sector in combination with low CO2 energy carriers. Summation of nationally determined contribution greenhouse gas emission numbers would not reach the level required to achieve the long-term temperature rise target adopted in the Paris Agreement. Some scientists consider climate engineering, namely, human intervention in the climate, as an option. CO2 removal and solar radiation management are the options of climate engineering, and practical evaluations are under way in the area of climate-energy system modeling and social sciences. Chemical engineering-related research, development and deployment will play an important role in almost all fields of technological climate change countermeasures in the future.