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This study addresses continuing concern over television's displacement of other leisure activities form both substantive and methodological perspectives. It examines past conceptualizations of the mechanism by which television is assumed to displace other activities. Following a critical review of the displacement literature, the authors examine data from an 8-year panel study of the introduction of television to South Africa and use a variety of methodological approaches to illustrate a major source of inconsistency in findings from previous studies. The displacement mechanism is found to be asymmetric in nature; that is, although increases in television viewing force out some other activities, decreases in television viewing do not result in parallel increases in levels of any of these activities. This pattern of findings was most pronounced in the case of radio use and movie attendance. Implications for conceptualization of the displacement process are discussed in relation to these findings.

One hundred and ninety-three governments adopted the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2015. The agreement foresees, for the near term, a new bottom-up process where countries pledge so-called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025–2030. At the same time, the Paris Agreement defines the longterm objective to hold temperature change to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it further to 1.5 °C. The consistency between the NDCs and the long-term temperature goals is planned to be regularly assessed in global stocktaking exercises as part of the international negotiations. At the same time, countries have also committed themselves to implement a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in order to eradicate poverty, protect the global environment and spur inclusive economic development. Within this context, the CD-LINKS project (www.cd-links.org) brought together an international team of researchers with global, national and sectoral expertise to explore possible linkages between national and global pathways consistent with the overall objective of the Paris Agreement and sustainable development. Part of this work is summarised in this special issue in Climatic Change, which contains eleven papers, including this introductory one, presenting the insights from the collaboration between national and global modelling teams and yielding a more coherent and detailed picture of the future than is typical of climate change mitigation pathways studies focusing on the global level only.

One hundred and ninety-three governments adopted the Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2015. The agreement foresees, for the near term, a new bottom-up process where countries pledge so-called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) for reducing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2025–2030. At the same time, the Paris Agreement defines the longterm objective to hold temperature change to well below 2 °C and to pursue efforts to limit it further to 1.5 °C. The consistency between the NDCs and the long-term temperature goals is planned to be regularly assessed in global stocktaking exercises as part of the international negotiations. At the same time, countries have also committed themselves to implement a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in order to eradicate poverty, protect the global environment and spur inclusive economic development. Within this context, the CD-LINKS project (www.cd-links.org) brought together an international team of researchers with global, national and sectoral expertise to explore possible linkages between national and global pathways consistent with the overall objective of the Paris Agreement and sustainable development. Part of this work is summarised in this special issue in Climatic Change, which contains eleven papers, including this introductory one, presenting the insights from the collaboration between national and global modelling teams and yielding a more coherent and detailed picture of the future than is typical of climate change mitigation pathways studies focusing on the global level only.

Bioenergy is the EU's leading renewable energy source at present. Understanding bioenergy's contribution to the future EU energy mix is strategically relevant for mid to long term climate targets. This review consolidates recent projections of both supply and demand dynamics for EU bioenergy to 2050, drawing from resource-focused, demand-driven and integrated assessment approaches. Projections are synthesised to identify absolute ranges, determine cohesion with policy and draw insights on the implications for the scale of development, trade and energy security. Supply side studies have undergone methodological harmonisation efforts in recent years. Despite this, due to assumptions on key uncertainties such as feedstock yields, technical potential estimates range from 9 to 25 EJyr-1 of EU domestically available biomass for energy in 2050. Demand side projections range between 5 and 19 EJyr-1 by 2050. This range is primarily due to variations in study assumptions on key influential developments such as economic competitivity of bioenergy, EU energy efficiency gains within the power sector, flexibility for meeting mitigation targets and technological portfolios. Upper bound technical supply estimates are able meet future demand wholly from the domestic resource base, holding the potential to reduce total EU primary energy import dependency 22% points from the current EU roadmap trajectory. However, due to part of this domestic resource base being deemed economically inaccessible or of insufficient quality, interregional imports are projected to increase from current 4% to 13–76%. Emergence of non-energy applications are projected to compete for at least 10% of the biomass needed to fulfil bioenergy demand in 2050.

Hopes are high that removing fossil fuel subsidies could help to mitigate climate change by discouraging inefficient energy consumption and levelling the playing field for renewable energy1,2,3. In September 2016, the G20 countries re-affirmed their 2009 commitment (at the G20 Leaders' Summit) to phase out fossil fuel subsidies4,5 and many national governments are using today's low oil prices as an opportunity to do so6,7,8,9. In practical terms, this means abandoning policies that decrease the price of fossil fuels and electricity generated from fossil fuels to below normal market prices10,11. However, whether the removal of subsidies, even if implemented worldwide, would have a large impact on climate change mitigation has not been systematically explored. Here we show that removing fossil fuel subsidies would have an unexpectedly small impact on global energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions and would not increase renewable energy use by 2030. Subsidy removal would reduce the carbon price necessary to stabilize greenhouse gas concentration at 550 parts per million by only 2–12 per cent under low oil prices. Removing subsidies in most regions would deliver smaller emission reductions than the Paris Agreement (2015) climate pledges and in some regions global subsidy removal may actually lead to an increase in emissions, owing to either coal replacing subsidized oil and natural gas or natural-gas use shifting from subsidizing, energy-exporting regions to non-subsidizing, importing regions. Our results show that subsidy removal would result in the largest CO2 emission reductions in high-income oil- and gas-exporting regions, where the reductions would exceed the climate pledges of these regions and where subsidy removal would affect fewer people living below the poverty line than in lower-income regions.

Acknowledgements The work of CDJ, JAL, AW was supported by the Joint UK DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101). CDJ, JAL, AW, PF, EK, DvV are supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 641816 (CRESCENDO). GPP was supported by the Norwegian Research Council (project 209701). PC acknowledges support from the European Research Council Synergy grant ERC-2013-SyG-610028 IMBALANCE-P. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table 1 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in artnership with the Global Organization for Earth system Science Portals. ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF

Funded by European Union (EU) ; Peer reviewed ; Publisher PDF