Publication
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has published the Global Energy and Climate Outlook 2025. This edition of the GECO presents an updated view on the implications of energy and climate policies around the world. Under current legislated policies, global emissions peak immediately and decrease gradually to 2005 levels by 2050, but
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has published the Global Energy and Climate Outlook 2025. This edition of the GECO presents an updated view on the implications of energy and climate policies around the world. Under current legislated policies, global emissions peak immediately and decrease gradually to 2005 levels by 2050, but global climate mitigation efforts continue to fall short of what is needed.
Strengthening clean energy competitiveness compared to the incumbent fossil fuel technologies is crucial to keeping the 1.5°C goal within reach. GECO 2025 assesses the competitiveness of a range of key clean energy technologies globally, within the context of meeting global temperature targets. On the one hand, several low-carbon technologies such as solar, wind and electric vehicles are broadly competitive in many world regions and are expected to achieve high levels of deployment in terms of total capacity installed, with little to no additional policy support. On the other hand, several other necessary low-carbon technologies, such as synthetic fuels and CO2 capture, are not expected to achieve the levels of deployment foreseen in a scenario aligned with the 1.5°C climate target without reinforced policy support.
Even if clean technologies can be scaled to rise to the decarbonisation challenge, there are concerns that the current climate of trade tensions could affect the global ability to reach the 1.5°C climate target. GECO 2025 looks at the possible effects and finds that there is limited interaction between climate and trade policy at global GDP level. This limited interaction results from the impact of tariffs on GDP as well as on emission intensity: trade fragmentation puts downwards pressure on the global economy’s total output, and therefore also on GHG emissions. However, fragmentation simultaneously increases the global economy’s emission intensity, ultimately hampering deep decarbonization and the global ability to reach the 1.5°C climate target.
In addition to the report, energy and GHG balances and data visualisations have also been published on the GECO webpage.