Industrial sector pathways to a well-below 2 °C world: A global integrated assessment perspective

The heavy industry is often regarded as hard-to-abate due to its importance to infrastructure build-up and capital stock, its reliance on high-temperature heat requirements, and the critical role it plays in global supply chains and security. These complexities have often been invoked to justify the persistence of residual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cement, steel, and chemicals production by the year of net-zero, which, in contrast, suggest the need for global-scale roll-out of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies. In this study, we use the global integrated assessment model (IAM) COFFEE with a detailed representation of industrial processes to understand the role of the industrial sector in climate change mitigation scenarios with different temperature ambitions. Our findings reveal a nuanced picture. While the industrial sector presents residual emissions of 1300–7600 MtCO2yr−1 in well-below 2 °C scenarios by 2050, it also emerges as a key mitigation asset in specific subsectors (e.g. chemicals and steel) and regions (e.g. AUS, BRA, CAN CAM, SAM), depending on the level of climate ambition pursued and the availability of biomass and carbon capture scale-up. Thus, the sector's role in climate change mitigation is context-dependent, opening pathways for strategic planning and technological and regional targeted actions.