Laura Díaz, professor at the University of Cambridge: "Without profound and imminent changes, the objective of the Paris Agreement is out of our reach"

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"Since I was little I liked science, and having been born in Asturias and going to the mountains every weekend, I was always very interested in the environment," says Laura Díaz Anadón (Oviedo, 1981), professor of climate change policies at the University of Cambridge.

After graduating in chemical engineering at the universities of Manchester and Stuttgart, a doctorate at Cambridge and a master's degree in Economics and Public Policy at Harvard, this climate scientist has focused her career on investigating what governments can do to develop and expand technologies and industries with less impact.

The also director of the Center for the Governance of the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources of the University of Cambridge is one of the Spanish scientists who has participated in the preparation of the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC, the intergovernmental group of experts in change UN climate.

On April 4, they presented the third and last part of this great report, considered the greatest scientific analysis on climate change and the document used as a reference by politicians for climate negotiations.

While the first part focused on the science of climate change, the second dealt with the impacts and this third installment is dedicated to mitigation measures.

Díaz is one of the leading authors of chapter 16, dedicated to innovation, technological development and technology transfer.

After its analysis, the UN has urged countries to act "immediately" if they want to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 ºC by the end of the century, as agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement. focus is on 1.5C because it's the aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement, but every fraction of a degree matters. The more we limit the temperature, the better. 1.6 is better than 1.7 and 1.7 is better than 1 ,8. The important thing is that in the next eight years we reduce emissions as much as possible and this report explains that there are options in all sectors to achieve it in this crucial decade", he explains during an interview by Zoom from Harvard University, in the USA. , where she is spending a season as a visiting researcher.

How would you explain in a summarized way how they work to make those exhaustive IPCC reports that they publish every seven years in which so many authors participate? It is a very long and laborious process.

To give you an idea, we have been working on it since 2018.

There are four meetings in person, but due to Covid two of the four were done remotely and their publication was delayed for about half a year.

The first meeting of lead authors of working group III of the sixth assessment report was in Edinburgh in April 2019 and the second in October of the same year in Delhi.

The third was going to be in April 2020 in Quito, but it was virtual, like the fourth, which was going to be held in Italy.

In each chapter there is representation of scientists from different countries and areas and the scientific literature published since the previous report, in 2014, is reviewed. In each chapter everything that is known and the evidence on each topic is summarized.

There is also a technical summary for the

, the politicians who make the decisions, which is the text that is discussed in the meetings prior to the publication of the report.

In this working group III, 278 authors from 65 countries have participated -41% from developing countries and 59% from developed countries-, in addition to another 354 scientists who have also contributed, with a distribution of 29% women and 71 % of men.

We have reviewed more than 18,000 scientific articles and had to respond to more than 59,000 comments that came to us from other scientists, review editors, governments etc. Now that they have published the full Sixth Assessment Report, what overall assessment would you make? of their conclusions? The first thing is that during the last decade we have seen the greatest increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the history of humanity, not in percentage but in absolute terms.

Between 2010 and 2019 they rose 19%.

Working group III concludes that the current trajectory is not consistent with the objective of the Paris Agreement of stabilizing the increase in temperature at 1.5 ºC. The second thing is that there are some improvements and routes to follow.

Although emissions have continued to rise since 2010, annual growth in the energy and industry sectors has slowed by 50%, meaning we are slowing the rate of increase in emissions.

In the transport sector the rise has remained constant.

Another trend is that the cost of various technologies that we are going to need to reduce emissions to net zero has fallen very significantly in the last 10 years, and more than expected, for example in solar panels and lithium batteries.

In many places they are already competitive.

The third piece of evidence is that in the last 10 years there have been some 18 countries that have steadily reduced their emissions not only in terms of production but also consumption, and this is partly due to the innovation policies that have been implemented. scenarios consistent with the 1.5ºC target that were analyzed in working group III showed that it is necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% before 2030, compared to 2019 levels. It is a very large cut .

But without profound and imminent changes in all sectors of society - governments, citizens, the private sector - limiting the temperature increase to 1.5 ºC will be out of reach.

The fourth message is that it is very clear that if we do not mitigate climate change, it is impossible to achieve the sustainable development goals.

Water, poverty, biodiversity and health, both mental and physical, are interconnected. You finished the report before the start of the war in Ukraine but the UN secretary general has warned that it may affect the fight against change climate The deadline for the literature we review is October 11, 2021, so the impact of this crisis has not been studied.

What we can obviously say is that politicians have competing priorities, and the role of this report is to make sure they have the latest information available on climate change.

Yes, there is an assessment of the impact of Covid, 2020 emissions were 5.8% lower than 2019. But if we look month by month, at the end of 2020 they rebounded to December 2019 levels.

And can that reduction in emissions for a few months have a certain positive impact? We cannot yet assess the long-term impact of the changes that occurred in 2020 due to the pandemic.

There are certain indications about transport or teleworking, which have been maintained in the short term but the long-term impact is not yet known, if people are going to continue doing it or if there are going to be company decisions that apply it to structure level.

Between 40 and 70% of the emissions that we can reduce between now and 2030 can be cut due to demand management issues in transport, consumption, buildings... There are 60 demand options and the most promising for reducing emissions are walking and cycling and the electrification of transport.

But these decisions do not depend only on people, they cannot materialize without infrastructures,

technologies and incentives.

The report says that the world must reach its peak of greenhouse gas emissions before 2025, from your point of view, are there economic resources and political will to achieve it? On whether governments have the political will or is it their number one priority , I can say that this report collects in chapters 13 (national policies) and 16 (in which I participate) evidence on public policies for the diffusion of renewables, electric vehicles, energy efficiency, decarbonization of industry... All are evaluated these policies and we have seen that they have had a positive impact both in reducing CO2 emissions and in reducing the cost of solar panels, for example, and other technologies that we need.

We have seen that in some cases they have had a short-term negative impact, for example on social groups that work in fossil fuel sectors.

If we do not design these policies well, there may be groups in society that unfairly suffer more from short-term expenses.

Involving these sectors in a preventive way so that the usual ones do not suffer, it is possible to accelerate the energy transition in a fair way.

This third part focuses on mitigation tasks.

What strategies would be most appropriate in Spain? This report is not prescriptive, it does not say what the different regions have to do, but it does say that in order to reduce emissions with the objective of 1.5 ºC or 2 ºC there are some things that are going to be be necessary globally, not only in the Mediterranean area:

the use of coal without CO2 sequestration would have to drop more or less 75% before 2030, a very large expansion of renewables in the electricity sector, a much larger electrification of transport;

better energy efficiency, reduce the use of gas, increase efficiency in the industrial sector... How do you think society's perception of climate change has evolved? We know that there are differences in the world.

Now it is no longer said so much that it is not happening, but that we cannot do anything about it.

It is very clear that the trajectory of emissions that we are going to have and, consequently, the temperature of the Earth, we are going to decide by the actions that governments, people and companies take.

This report is very clear that stabilizing the rise at 1.5 or 1.6 degrees is up to us.

But we people alone cannot, the individual contribution is modest compared to the change in behavior and demand channeled by investments in infrastructure and policy incentives. Coinciding with the publication of the report there have been protests by a collective of scientists, Scientific Rebellion , present in 25 countries.

What do you think about them demonstrating, and doing actions to attract attention such as throwing red paint on Congress? I am not going to comment specifically on this, but the role of civil society is also covered in the report, we see that involving different groups of civil society in the decision-making and policy process is necessary to be able to design inclusive policies and that later also have support from society and can expand and become stronger.

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