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Impacts of climate change on energy systems in global and regional scenarios

Nature Energy volume 5, pages 794–802 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Although our knowledge of climate change impacts on energy systems has increased substantially over the past few decades, there remains a lack of comprehensive overview of impacts across spatial scales. Here, we analyse results of 220 studies projecting climate impacts on energy systems globally and at the regional scale. Globally, a potential increase in cooling demand and decrease in heating demand can be anticipated, in contrast to slight decreases in hydropower and thermal energy capacity. Impacts at the regional scale are more mixed and relatively uncertain across regions, but strongest impacts are reported for South Asia and Latin America. Our assessment shows that climate impacts on energy systems at regional and global scales are uncertain due partly to the wide range of methods and non-harmonized datasets used. For a comprehensive assessment of climate impacts on energy, we propose a consistent multi-model assessment framework to support regional-to-global-scale energy planning.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual framework of our assessment of climate change impacts on energy systems, based on past studies.
Fig. 2: Number of papers published from 2002 to 2019 about climate change impacts on renewable energy supply, energy demand and integrating energy systems.
Fig. 3: Climate change impacts on energy systems.
Fig. 4: Climate change impacts on energy systems averaged across studies, presented per region from results of the reviewed studies.

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Data availability

All data that support the findings of this study presented in the figures are provided in the Source Data section associated with this manuscript. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the JPI Climate initiative and participating grant institutes for funding the ISIpedia project. We also thank J. Burrough for professional advice on the English of a near-final draft. E.d.C. has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 756194 (ENERGYA). J.G. is supported by a research grant from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under the SFI-NSFC Partnership Programme, grant no. 17/NSFC/5181. D.P.v.V., R.S. and D.E.H.J.G. are supported by the Horizon 2020 NAVIGATE project, and D.P.v.V., R.S. and D.E.H.J.G. also acknowledge support from the COMMIT and Horizon 2020 ENGAGE project. F.P. acknowledges support through the project ENGAGE funded in the framework of the Leibniz Competition (SAW-2016-PIK-1), as well as through the project CHIPS, part of AXIS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate, and funded by FORMAS (SE), DLR/BMBF (DE, grant no. 01LS19XXY), AEI (ES) and ANR (FR) with cofunding by the European Union (grant no. 776608). R.S. acknowledges the financial support from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), from the National Institute of Science and Technology for Climate Change Phase 2 under CNPq grant no. 465501/2014-1 and the National Coordination for High Level Education and Training (CAPES) grant no. 88887.136402/2017-00, all from Brazil. A.M. acknowledges support from the US Department of Energy, Office of Science’s Integrated Multisector Multiscale Modelling project and National Science Foundation’s Water Sustainability and Climate grant no. 1360445. This work was authored in part by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (A.M.), operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the US Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. S.F. is supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-1908 and 2-2002) provided by the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency, Japan. C.P. is supported by Korea Environment Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI) through Climate Change R&D Programme, funded by the Korea Ministry of Environment (MOE) (2018001310003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Seleshi G. Yalew, David E. H. J. Gernaat, Ioanna Mouratiadou & Detlef P. van Vuuren

  2. Water Systems and Global Change Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Seleshi G. Yalew, Michelle T. H. van Vliet & Fulco Ludwig

  3. Policy Analysis, Department of Multi-Actor Systems, Technical University of Delft, Delft, the Netherlands

    Seleshi G. Yalew

  4. Department of Physical Geography, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

    Michelle T. H. van Vliet

  5. Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency-PBL, The Hague, the Netherlands

    David E. H. J. Gernaat & Detlef P. van Vuuren

  6. Advanced Science Research Center, GC/CUNY, New York City, NY, USA

    Ariel Miara

  7. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, USA

    Ariel Miara

  8. Department of Landscape Architecture, College of Urban Science, University of Seoul, Seoul, Korea

    Chan Park

  9. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis-IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria

    Edward Byers

  10. Fondazione CMCC, Venice, Italy

    Enrica De Cian & Shouro Dasgupta

  11. Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Venice, Italy

    Enrica De Cian & Shouro Dasgupta

  12. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Leibniz Association, Potsdam, Germany

    Franziska Piontek & Robert Pietzcker

  13. Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, College Park, MD, USA

    Gokul Iyer, Mohamad Hejazi & Silvia R. Santos da Silva

  14. MaREI Centre, Environmental Research Institute, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    James Glynn

  15. Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London, London, UK

    Olivier Dessens

  16. Programa de Planejamento Energético, COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Pedro Rochedo & Roberto Schaeffer

  17. Center for Social and Environmental Systems Research, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan

    Shinichiro Fujimori

  18. Department of Environmental Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Shinichiro Fujimori

  19. Laboratoire d’économie appliquée de Grenoble, Grenoble, France

    Silvana Mima

  20. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Silvia R. Santos da Silva

  21. Council on Energy, Environment and Water, New Delhi, India

    Vaibhav Chaturvedi

  22. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement-LSCE, Paris, France

    Robert Vautard

Authors
  1. Seleshi G. Yalew
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  2. Michelle T. H. van Vliet
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  3. David E. H. J. Gernaat
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  4. Fulco Ludwig
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  5. Ariel Miara
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  6. Chan Park
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  12. James Glynn
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  13. Mohamad Hejazi
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  14. Olivier Dessens
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  15. Pedro Rochedo
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  16. Robert Pietzcker
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  17. Roberto Schaeffer
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  18. Shinichiro Fujimori
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  19. Shouro Dasgupta
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  20. Silvana Mima
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  21. Silvia R. Santos da Silva
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  22. Vaibhav Chaturvedi
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  23. Robert Vautard
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  24. Detlef P. van Vuuren
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Contributions

S.G.Y. and D.P.v.V. codesigned the study. S.G.Y. collected and analysed data, and cowrote the initial draft manuscript with D.P.v.V. S.G.Y., D.P.v.V. and M.T.H.v.V. performed sectoral analysis of energy systems. S.G.Y., D.P.v.V., M.T.H.v.V., D.E.H.J.G., F.L., A.M., C.P., E.B., E.d.C., F.P., G.I., I.M., J.G., M.H., O.D., P.R., R.P., R.S., S.F., S.D., S.M., S.R.S.d.S., V.C. and R.V. contributed to the review of sectoral and regional climate impacts.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seleshi G. Yalew.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–3, Note 1 and Fig. 1.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2

Data points of articles, their category and years published.

Source Data Fig. 3

Data points of article category, warming level and scenario years.

Source Data Fig. 4

Data points of percentage changes of climate impact per region.

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Yalew, S.G., van Vliet, M.T.H., Gernaat, D.E.H.J. et al. Impacts of climate change on energy systems in global and regional scenarios. Nat Energy 5, 794–802 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-0664-z

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