Herewith a set of very specific questions on scenario use, and what SBTi’s position is on using other climate scenario’s than those from IEA considered and used in the several SBTi target setting tools.
At several occasions in the SBTi Financial Institutions Guidance it is mentioned that SBTi’s sectoral decarbonization approach does not incorporate any regional pathways. At the same time it is acknowledged however that sectoral emissions may vary across different regions (e.g. buildings emissions as stated on p. 120 of the Guidance). Needless to state indeed that the efforts all of the continents across the globe may vary considerably: the regional context of a financial institution is therefore key to understand the level of ambition that should be pursued in the context of climate target setting.
In our endeavour of setting EU-specific sectoral climate targets we are currently using the climate scenarios as used and released by the Network for Greening the Financial System. The big advantage of these scenarios is that they allow to extract sectoral pathways on a more regionally relevant scale (i.e. EU level). The drawback is that they not always necessarily have all the data included as those from the IEA (e.g. passenger kilometers for various different transport modes, etc.). I understood that SBTi’s position is that it assesses targets based on regional pathways and accepts targets as long as these are more ambitious than those defined in global pathways (dixit p. 125 of the SBTi Financial Sector Guidance on the SDA for Commercial Real Estate).
But how would this work exactly technically?*
Does SBTi hence also allow own created models for target validation or does this require an adjustment of the scenario data that has been used in the relevant SBTi target setting tools?
Also, any word on what SBTi’s position is vis-à-vis the use of these NGFS scenarios for target setting purposes would be welcome?