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Climate and energy challenges for materials science

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 117–120 (2016)Cite this article

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The Paris agreement on climate change represents an important step in the design of a new global framework for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. Energy efficiency and renewable energy are keys for the success of this ambitious agreement.

The risks of irreversible, catastrophic consequences of human-induced global warming have concerned scientists in the past decades, and have called for a concerted action from policymakers to prevent them. A clear sign of the impact that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are having on the earth's climate is that the average global temperature of the most recent years is the warmest on record. As a result, glaciers are rapidly disappearing and sea levels are rising more than 0.2 cm per year. In September 2015, the average global temperature over land and ocean surfaces was 0.9 °C above the twentieth-century average1. This temperature rise is in line with the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecasting models, which relate these effects to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. At the start of 2015, the CO2 concentration was 400 parts per million (ppm). The IPCC estimates that a CO2 concentration of 450 ppm — which, at the current rates of emission, will be reached in 2040 — would result in a global temperature rise of 2 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. Beyond 2 °C, experts predict serious consequences for the Earth's climate.

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Figure 1: Potential global final renewable energy use in 2030.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dolf Gielen, Francisco Boshell and Deger Saygin work for the International Renewable Energy Agency, IRENA Innovation and Technology Centre, Robert-Schuman-Platz 3, 53175 Bonn, Germany,

    Dolf Gielen, Francisco Boshell & Deger Saygin

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  1. Dolf Gielen
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  2. Francisco Boshell
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  3. Deger Saygin
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Correspondence to Dolf Gielen.

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Gielen, D., Boshell, F. & Saygin, D. Climate and energy challenges for materials science. Nature Mater 15, 117–120 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4545

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