Deep decarbonisation requires us to tackle all sources of emissions. While the hard to abate sectors will significantly benefit from decarbonisation of the electricity grid there is significant work to adapt industrial processes and to deal with other greenhouse gas emissions to achieve net zero.
As part of this process cost competitiveness will change and supply chains may be reconfigured impacting advantageous industry configurations and interdependencies and cascading effects on to regional economies.
Industrial decarbonisation will be occurring simultaneously to other actions to decarbonise economies including changing energy price structures and needs for transmission capacity, scaling of negative emissions technologies to contribute to net zero goals, increasing demand and broader use of land and natural feedstocks to drive the bioeconomy and exogenous price influences on critical inputs and labour.
Foresight and purposeful planning can allow for supporting policy and incentives to capture opportunities and minimise unintended consequences of the net zero transition. It is critical to develop integrated decarbonization pathways at multiple scales (regional to national) to guide actions.
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CSIRO seeks proposals that directly address the challenge of lowering carbon emissions whilst building regional energy and resource security by directly identifying decarbonization (emission reduction) options and pathways along with their interaction with land use, economy, and socio-economic values. Of particular interest are approaches to downscaling to sub-regional areas, and intercomparison of approaches to anticipating impacts.
All proposals aligned with this theme should contain a section that clearly describes how the proposed solution is complementary to CSIRO’s Towards Net Zero Mission.