Editor’s note: Jared Woollacott, Ph.D. is a senior environmental economist in RTI International’s newly launched Center for Climate Solutions with 10 years’ experience developing and applying economy-wide models to a wide set of energy and environmental problems.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Climate change is posing a broad portfolio of risk for North Carolinians and our economy, from sea level rise to increased prevalence of insect-borne diseases like Zika virus. Without more progress to stem climate change, North Carolina’s economy is likely to face a steadily growing drain on productivity and recurrent asset losses over the coming years and decades. Some of the most prominent threats we face from climate change include:
- Higher intensity tropical storms that threaten lives and property losses, disrupting business operations and diverting our investments from continued growth to disaster recovery
- Higher frequency of very hot days that make it harder to work productively outdoors, increase energy costs, reduce crop yields, and can increase the amount of pollution in the atmosphere, spelling serious health consequences.
- Higher sea levels that make our storms more dangerous, undermine our groundwater supply, and damage coastal forests and agricultural lands—about two-thirds of our agricultural production come from these coastal communities.
Challenging as it may be, global coordination will have to happen to secure a stable climate future. Over the past week, conversations and negotiations have been underway at the at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26). Key focal points for the negotiations include setting accounting rules and consistently specified reduction targets for global emissions, making good on climate finance commitments from high-income countries, and establishing a structure for carbon markets that can help reduce the cost of making a transition to a net-zero emissions future.
RTI establishes new technical unit; focus will be on responding to climate change
COP negotiations will also need to integrate key equity concerns like consideration of historical responsibilities for climate change and the loss and damage some countries cannot avoid from coming climate change. While global leaders work toward much needed progress on climate action, there is important work for us to do here in North Carolina to prepare for the risks of climate change. To follow through on our commitments at the COP, we will need national and local policies to help hasten the clean energy transition.
The Energy Solutions for North Carolina bill is an important start on our mitigation efforts, but more can and must be done on climate. North Carolina’s research institutions and business communities have a collective capacity to provide broad leadership on both sides of climate action, both in mitigating emissions and in planning to adapt and be more resilient to the climate change we do not avoid.
North Carolina is already a leader in solar deployment, with comparable solar generation capacity to the Sunshine State, and about as much as Arizona and New Mexico combined—states with some of the best solar potential in the country. We also have the second-most offshore wind net technical energy potential in the US but are lagging in capacity with less wind than most states.
Though there are definite costs to implementing a clean energy transition, building and operating renewable facilities does offer business opportunities, income, and jobs for North Carolina. Renewable energy sources are an important technology ingredient in our transition to a carbon-free economy, but renewable energy technologies alone won’t be enough to get us to a stable climate future. Energy storage technologies, carbon-free energy carriers like green hydrogen, and technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere all require our technical ingenuity and development to meet our mitigation goals.
Unless policy shifts, climate change puts human health at risk, finds RTI study
Climate change will impact nearly aspect of society and economy. What we do on mitigation now will determine how much climate impact and disruption we bear, but some of those impacts are already unavoidable. North Carolina’s leading research institutions and our banking, health, and technology sectors have collective interest and critical capacity to advance our understanding of how, when, and where climate will impact us.
The breadth of problems climate change is posing, spanning so many disciplines and sectors of our economy and demanding the attention of every part of government and the business community, needs an integrated, systemic approach from not only organizations like RTI, but North Carolina’s entire innovation economy.
Understanding climate impacts will require advancing our region’s capacity for providing complex climate data analytics and physical and social simulation sciences. Working together on this problem can help North Carolina better prepare for the climate change we do not avoid and provide national and global leadership on the climate solutions we critically need.
Report: Climate change poses risk to real estate investments beyond the coasts
