ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE

IAC2021 Volume 19

Natalia Summerville, Volume Co-editor

Victoria Ellison, Volume Co-editor

Nicholas G. Hall, Editor

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) summarized that in order for the global average temperature to remain within 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels, the annual amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere needs to be drastically reduced by 2050 at the latest. Failure to stay within 1.5° C levels poses large risks for the sustainability of human and environmental systems stemming from an increased risk of global temperature extremes, heavy precipitation events, extreme droughts, forest fires, and many other factors. These increased risk factors can lead to an exacerbation of global poverty, loss of biodiversity, and a general degradation of the natural environment.

As discussed in our overview section documents, domain experts have identified the following sectors of industry which currently contribute most of the global greenhouse gas emissions each year: electricity systems, transportation, buildings, industry, and farming and forestry. An increased focus on technological innovation is needed in order to achieve dramatic and timely reductions in the amount of greenhouse emissions produced by each of these sectors. Within each of these sectors, industry experts have furthermore identified a series of key bottlenecks where analytics solutions can and have been able to deliver maximal impact to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. In this collection, we highlight some of these recent analytics developments that have brought impactful contributions to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions within each of these sectors in four sections. For a more in-depth and complete coverage of each of these key impact areas, we encourage the readers of our collection to browse through the literature reviews in our overview section.