Page 97 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 2

Burcu Hiçyılmaz - Sedat Alataş - Etem Karakaya

Introduction

The main long-term goal of the Paris Agreement ratified in late 2015, during
the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at
the 21 Conference of the Parties (COP21) was to keep the global average
st
temperature increase below 2°C from the pre-industrial period, and if possible,
to limit it to 1,5°C (UN, 2015). The success of this long-term goal depends
largely on the urgent global actions to be taken towards mitigating carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions, which have the biggest share of the greenhouse
gasses released in the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels. If these
goals aren’t sufficiently met, as stated in the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), the negative impacts of global temperature increases
on society and nature will incrementally increase (IPCC, 2018-2022a). For this
reason, one of the major points discussed was that countries needed to make
more ambitious commitments to reach the 1,5°C goal (COP26, 2021).
One of the most important challenges at the center of the fight against
climate change is undoubtedly the mitigation of sectoral emissions, especially
industry-based GHG emissions. The most important reason for this is that
around 40% of total carbon emissions are due to the industrial sector and this
high percentage places industry at the top of the list among sector-based
emissions (International Energy Agency [IEA], 2021a). Thus, it is anticipated
that industrial sector-based climate strategies are crucial for the fight against
climate change, and the net zero goal will fail unless serious emission
reductions in this sector are not taken into account (Material Economics [ME],
2019; IEA, 2021b).
On the other hand, the mitigation of industry-based emissions differs from
the other sectors in certain ways, which leads to the conviction that it is a “hard-
to-abate” sector (Ahman and Nilsson, 2015; Loftus et al, 2015; Wesseling et al,
2017; Bataille et al, 2018; Bataille, 2020, IEA, 2020b). This has led to the industry
to fall behind the other sectors in terms of emission abatement (Allwood et al,
2011; Allwood et al, 2013; Denis-Ryan et al, 2016; Aidt et al, 2017; Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]/IEA, 2017; Davis et
al, 2018; Bataille et al, 2018; ME, 2019; Bataille, 2020; Alataş et al, 2021a-b;
Karakaya et al, 2021). There are many different reasons that make the industrial
sector “hard-to-abate” and make it fall behind the others: the carbon leakage
issue, the costs burden, and economic-technical dependencies, etc. However,
it can be generally claimed that these reasons are fundamentally related to
the production structure of the industrial sector. To be more specific, a large
portion of industrial sector-based emissions are caused by sub-sectors such as
iron & steel, cement, and chemicals-petrochemistry. These sub-sectors (i) are
part of an energy-intensive production process and they meet their need for

83 Journal of Environment, Urbanization and Climate