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One of the biggest challenges for sustainable international economic development is the need to control greenhouse gas emissions. Before we can make meaningful progress toward stabilizing the planet’s climate, we need to have an international roadmap for economic growth, job creation and poverty alleviation that still bends the curve on emissions.

Solutions for saving the planet need to be ones that contribute to economic growth! Certainly, for developed economies, we need to have a plan for sustainable growth that includes emerging energy-efficiency technologies, novel green generation technologies and new infrastructures. For the developing world, however, the path to development goes through an increase in per capita consumption of energy. A fundamental sticking point to agreeing to an international agreement on carbon emissions has been the concern in developing economies that such an agreement will stymie GDP growth.

I deeply believe, however, that it is possible to chart a course for economic advancement in both developed and developing economies while still curbing greenhouse emissions. On the demand side, overall energy consumption can be grouped into three categories: buildings, transportation and industry. For example, energy-efficiency technologies have the potential to reduce energy consumption in buildings in an economically viable fashion by as much as 50 percent in the next five years, with the consequent drops in greenhouse gas emissions. In countries in the midst of building booms, new advances in materials and green cement will lead to even higher savings.

On the supply side, new technologies such as smart grids, solar thermal, nuclear and hydrogen fuels hold rich possibilities. The specific trajectory to economic growth, however, will vary from economy to economy, and the overall trajectory will need to be set strategically through a rigorous and vibrant roadmapping process.

This carbon emission quandary, with stalled international negotiations and ineffective policies, is analogous to a problem faced by the semiconductor industry.

Although the semiconductor industry had been doubling every 12 to 18 months for close to three decades, by the late 1980s, the complexity of the semiconductor supply chain began to dampen innovation and cost billions. Semiconductor industry groups, academics and manufacturers met to discuss best practices and fundamental decisions underpinning their industry and created the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors in 1992. The plan continues to be updated annually and exists like a living document.

If the current boom in the Information Age and the ubiquity of devices such as smartphones, which rely on cheaper and faster semiconductors by the Silicon roadmap, is any indicator, the plan is working well.

To pursue the analogy between the Silicon roadmap and a carbon roadmap, with colleagues at UC Berkeley such as professors Spanos, Zysman, Ramesh and Doyle, we have launched the Center for Research in Energy Systems Transformation. CREST is under the rubric of the campuswide Berkeley Energy and Climate Initiative.

CREST is working to create roadmaps that are owned by implementers and are cooperatively developed for the purpose of guiding the world’s energy system toward high efficiency while producing fewer greenhouse gases.

The CREST carbon roadmap has two arms. The first is to develop long-term plans for specific carbon-reducing technologies. As a test case, Berkeley engineers are investigating how sensors and networks deployed in smart, green buildings can be designed for easy adoption on different scales. CREST makes use of Berkeley’s deep vein of multidisciplinary, smart building-technology research.

Second, CREST seeks to develop locally adapted tools and technologies that are sensitive to place, politics and culture. That’s why the second part of the CREST carbon roadmap is to identify obstacles to cross-national technology development and implementation. Colleagues such as professors Brewer, Miguel, Gadgil, Wolfram and others power the Blum Center for Developing Economies’ new partnership with USAID in a project called the Development Innovations Laboratory, which includes the development of sustainable energy technology roadmaps in economies such as India, Indonesia, Kenya, etc.

I was recently asked to serve on a new United Nations Scientific Advisory Board, which will provide guidance to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on international sustainable development issues, staffed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization with its mandate for science and technology.

I look forward to expanding on bringing the work that we are doing at centers such as CREST and Blum to the international conversation about sustainable development.

I am confident we can create a carbon-roadmap-style plan that outlines how equitable prosperity can be reached across the planet and shows that economic growth, job creation and greenhouse gas reduction are not mutually exclusive.

Shankar Sastry is dean of the College of Engineering and the faculty director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

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The panel, which is commissioned by the United Nations, is considered the leading scientific authority on issues of climate change. The report is the fifth issued by the IPCC, and it expressed a 95 percent level of certainty regarding anthropogenic climate change, representing an increase of 5 percent from the organization’s previous report, issued in 2007.

The report, which will be released in full in 2014, is composed of three working-group reports and a synthesis report. Working Group I, the only part of the report to be released thus far, addresses causes of climate change. Working Groups II and III assess the socioeconomic and environmental effects of climate change and options for mitigating climate change, respectively. The report includes contributions from more than 830 authors.

According to William Collins, a UC Berkeley professor of climate sciences and one of the lead authors of Working Group I, the report’s three takeaway messages are that the climate is changing, mankind is causing the change and, if our society does not change its behavior, these patterns of climate change will amplify.

Collins said stopping emission of greenhouse gases, from fossil fuels in particular, is a top priority in mitigating climate change and acknowledged that recent breakthroughs in creating sustainable energy could allow that goal to be accomplished.

“The community has been absorbing and coming to terms with this information more slowly than climate scientists would advise that they do so,” said Collins. “But I am a technical optimist in the sense that we know what we need to do and have invented much of the technology that we need to do it.”

UC Berkeley Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy Daniel Kammen emphasized the importance of the report, calling it in an email statement “another nail in an already sealed coffin on climate change deniers.” He added that it is technically and economically possible for the world to meet an 80 percent decarbonization target.

While much of the report confirms information that was released in previous studies, John Harte of UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group agreed with its significance.

“We’ve seen a huge effort in the past month to put up a smoke screen of misinformation to try to divert the country from taking the next step,” he said. “What the IPCC report does is act as a counterweight to this effort. Without it, I think the forces at work trying to deny the science would completely win.”

Contact Chloee Weiner at cweiner@dailycal.org.

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