The Global Calculator allows people to visualize how they can live an optimal lifestyle while combating climate change. It compares various paths towards creating a two-degree world.
Carbon Brief has been exploring this tool to better understand its capabilities. It provides an efficient means of conveying any potential trade-offs or synergies among various levers.
How to use the calculator
Launched in January 2015, the Global Calculator is an online tool that puts you in charge of reducing global emissions. Through 40 levers that control land use, energy consumption, transport, and building operations, you can experiment with different levels of effort and ambition when it comes to cutting emissions in 2050, such as limiting car usage or using renewable sources of power, which directly impact carbon dioxide emissions.
DECC’s tool, developed for governments worldwide ahead of COP21 UN climate negotiations in Paris, where an ambitious agreement on climate change is expected to be signed, seeks to demonstrate that people everywhere can enjoy prosperous European-style lifestyles without contributing dangerous climate change through changes to diet, travel, and energy consumption.
At present, people from over 14 countries are using this tool to map out national pathways. Anyone can access and use it free of charge; however, it comes with health warnings and no guarantees as to its accuracy; the more people use it, the more reliable it will become. Its foundation lies within the global energy, food, and land systems created by the World Resources Institute.
Levers
Levers are simple machines composed of a rigid bar pivoted on an anchor point known as a fulcrum and used to move heavy objects with less effort than would otherwise be required without it. There are three categories of levers depending on their arrangement of effort force, fulcrum, and load; this calculator helps you understand each class of lever by calculating the effort force needed to move its load.
The calculator controls are represented by around 40 levers positioned across the bottom half of your screen, divided into categories like energy, transport, and agriculture. By clicking on any of the names, a full description, including graphs and background information for that lever, will open. These levers can also be adjusted with different levels of effort, such as installing nuclear power plants or decreasing vehicle travel distances, by setting different levers accordingly; for instance, you might choose to deploy nuclear power stations or decrease car travel.
The global calculator employs optimization methods to find an optimal lever combination that gradually meets twelve input constraints and minimizes cumulative CO2 emissions while increasing GDP output. Alongside other assessed pathways considered (including the International Energy Agency (IEA) 6DS), this lever combination represents several options for reaching climate stability—an ambitious yet achievable goal! Our calculations indicate this can be reached by 2050 with sufficient ambition and effort.
Pathways
This tool enables users to make assumptions about future lifestyle, technology, fuels, and land use policies while testing their impact on climate change. They can choose among multiple pathways with the aim of maintaining global temperatures under 2 °C to prevent climate change that would threaten life on Earth.
The model draws upon data compiled through six expert workshops and public consultation, collecting a broad spectrum of views from different countries and regions. It features options for how efforts could be distributed among them as well as renewable energy generation rates worldwide, consumer reluctance and low action taken towards forests, as well as different scenarios of how much food could be locally grown globally.
To generate scenarios, the global calculator team utilized a Monte Carlo Markov chain approach to estimate the probability distribution of sustainable pathways, then optimized them using genetic algorithms under multi-constraint conditions, ultimately selecting an optimal pathway that maximized the likelihood of reaching the 2°C target while simultaneously minimizing total costs.
Although the global calculator provides individuals with tools for reducing their footprint, it does not take into account positive personal decisions such as eating local food, which reduces an individual’s footprint by decreasing transportation energy use, as well as helping humanity move away from overshoot and onto one sustainable planet.
Outputs
Consider who will use your calculator’s outputs before creating its outputs. Many countries conduct stakeholder mapping exercises during co-design and expert workshop phases of developing tools, but when updating or relaunching new versions, it’s worth refreshing this map and seeing who might engage with your tool in the future. Keeping a record of outputs you publish helps measure how the calculator has been utilized over time.
Stakeholders will be interested in different aspects of the outputs generated by your calculator. Some may want to understand long-term energy futures and any trade-offs and synergies created by specific lever changes, while others could focus on impacts to their sectoral policies or domestic climate mitigation efforts—for instance, private sector business leaders could look at low carbon growth as an opportunity to boost profits while creating jobs.
Other stakeholders will be eager to understand how your calculator can assist them in impressing international audiences and demonstrating their country’s climate ambition, for example when submitting their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the UNFCCC. For this, they require clear, concise, easily accessible outputs from your calculator that they can share with other nations.
FAQs
1. What is the Global Calculator?
The Global Calculator is an online tool to explore pathways for reducing global emissions while maintaining a prosperous lifestyle.
2. Who can use the Global Calculator?
Anyone can access and use the tool for free to map pathways for climate change mitigation.
3. What are the levers in the global calculator?
Levers represent various factors like energy, transport, and agriculture that can be adjusted to model emission scenarios.
4. What is the purpose of the global calculator?
It helps visualize how lifestyle, technology, and policy changes can limit global temperature rise to 2°C.
5. Is the Global Calculator accurate?
The tool comes with no guarantees of accuracy and improves as more people use and refine it.
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