"This is driven by global efforts to increase the development, uptake and transfer of clean energy efficient and other low emission technologies across the economy," explained Phillip Glyde, ABARE Executive Director, in releasing the report, Technology – toward a low emissions future.

"Strong projected economic growth, particularly in developing economies, along with continued global population growth, will result in significant increases in both global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions over the next fifty years under current policy settings."

"Considerable efforts must be made globally to contain the growth in greenhouse gas emissions. This report demonstrates that considerable reductions in emissions can be achieved through the enhanced development and uptake of cleaner technologies. However, strong action by both the public and private sector will be required to achieve this outcome," Mr Glyde emphasised.

The report explores an illustrative, enhanced technology scenario in which governments across all regions implement policy initiatives to develop and widely deploy currently available and plausible future clean technologies.

In this illustrative scenario, global and Australian greenhouse gas emissions are projected to fall by about 45 per cent and 50 per cent respectively, relative to the reference case (in which policy settings remain unchanged) at 2050.

In most OECD economies, including Australia, greenhouse gas emissions are projected to peak before 2020 and decline below 2004 levels before 2050 in the enhanced technology scenario. At 2050, Australia's emissions are projected to be about 23 per cent below the 2004 levels in the enhanced technology scenario.

"Such reductions would be a significant achievement. Despite these efforts, global emissions are still projected to increase by about 36 per cent between 2004 and 2050," Mr Glyde explained.

He also emphasised that mitigation strategies must eventually focus on employing abatement measures across all sectors of the economy. The development and widespread deployment of advanced future generation technologies will be necessary to achieve significant global emissions reductions, he added.   

ABARE's analysis highlights the size of the abatement task at hand.