Comparing model results to national climate policy goals: Results from the Asia modeling exercise

While the world has yet to adopt a single unified policy to limit climate change, many countries and regions have adopted energy and climate policies that have implications for global emissions. In this paper, we discuss a few key policies and how they are included in a set of 23 energy and integrated assessment models that participated in the Asia Modeling Exercise. We also compare results from these models for a small set of stylized scenarios to the pledges made as part of the Copenhagen Accord and the goals stated by the Major Economies Forum. We find that the targets outlined by the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Korea require significant policy action in most of the models analyzed. For most of the models in the study, however, the goals outlined by India are met without any climate policy. The stringency of climate policy required to meet China's Copenhagen pledges varies across models and accounting methodologies. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.