UCSB professor tapped to co-author the seventh IPCC assessment report on climate change mitigation

We need to reduce consumption: That was one of the strongest recommendations to come out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report on climate change (AR6).

“Reducing societal demand for energy and materials could mitigate up to around half of the emissions that we’re currently dealing with, without installing one additional solar panel or wind turbine,” said co-author Eric Masanet, a professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “This finding ended up being one of the key messages of the Sixth Assessment Report.”

For over three decades, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has produced the authoritative reports on climate change science and mitigation. Now embarking on its seventh assessment cycle, the IPCC has invited Masanet to return to co-author a key chapter on cutting emissions through reduced consumption.

Doing more with less

Human wellbeing requires goods and services: food, housing, transportation, healthcare, technology, and so forth. And all of these require energy and materials to carry out. But meeting these needs doesn’t require the amount of energy and materials currently devoted to this end, as Masanet and his co-authors pointed out in AR6. “We found that, if we could reduce demand for energy and materials in the first place, we can get nearly halfway to net zero by mid-century just by eliminating waste while still providing wellbeing for everyone,” he said.