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Thailand has established a target of carbon neutrality by 2050. Reaching this goal will require coordination and collaboration between stakeholders spanning sectors and scales, including energy system decision makers, land managers, and city planners. Robust decarbonization scenarios incorporating current plans and targets, additional measures needed, and trade-offs between strategies can help stakeholders make informed decisions in the face of uncertainty. Through iterative engagement with decision makers at the city and national levels, we develop and analyze carbon neutral scenarios for Thailand that incorporate Bangkok's role using a global integrated assessment model. We find that Thailand can reach carbon neutrality through power sector decarbonization, energy efficiency improvements, widespread electrification, and advanced technologies including carbon capture and storage and hydrogen. Negative emissions technologies will also be needed to offset Thailand and Bangkok's hardest-to-abate CO2 emissions. Bangkok, as a major population and economic center, contributes significantly to Thailand's energy demand and emissions and can therefore play an important role in climate change mitigation. Accordingly, our results underscore the importance of subnational climate action in meeting Thailand's carbon neutral goal. Our analysis also indicates that without sustained land-based carbon sequestration, much more mitigation effort will be needed in Thailand's energy sector, including at the subnational scale, to reach carbon neutrality. These insights can help stakeholders identify priorities, consider tradeoffs, and make decisions that will impact Bangkok and Thailand's long-term climate change mitigation potential. This analysis demonstrates how stakeholder engagement in integrated assessment modeling can facilitate and inform multilevel climate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thailand has a commitment to achieve net zero emissions. The roles of energy service demand reduction and hydrogen in the energy transition have not been sufficiently evaluated. This study analyzed energy and technological implications in the energy sector to attain net zero emissions in Thailand by 2050. This study used the AIM/Enduse model, a bottom-up type energy system model, as an analytical tool. A business-as-usual scenario and a net zero emission scenario are analyzed. Unlike other studies, this paper explored the energy transition in the absence of carbon, capture and sequestration (CCS) technology with a focus on energy service demand reduction and green hydrogen-based technologies. Decarbonization of the energy sector and transition towards net zero emission by 2050 in Thailand would require rapid deployment of renewable energy sources like solar, wind and biomass. In the net zero scenario, installed capacity of solar PV and wind for power generation in 2050 would reach 64 GW and 40 GW, respectively. In addition, green hydrogen will have a crucial role in achieving net zero emission target. The high carbon removals from LULUCF sector in Thailand will aid in reaching net zero emission without CCS technology in the energy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at exploring the economy-wide impacts of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050 in Thailand. This study developed a recursive dynamic Asia-Pacific Integrated Model/Computable General Equilibrium (AIM/CGE) model of Thailand for the assessment. The macroeconomic impacts of Thailand's net-zero GHG emission targets by 2050 are analyzed relative to its 2-degree pathway. Results indicate that Thailand should put more effort in GHG mitigation actions to achieve the emissions peak by 2025 and net-zero GHG emissions by 2050. Improvement in energy efficiency; increasing electrification; expanding renewable energy utilization; deploying green hydrogen; bioenergy; carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS); and behavioral changes are the key identified pillars of decarbonization to drive Thailand towards the pathways of net-zero emissions by 2050. Results show that there is a possibility of attaining net-zero GHG emissions by 2050 at the expense of an economic loss for Thailand. The gross domestic product (GDP) loss would be as high as 8.5% in 2050 to attain net-zero emissions. Lower productivity from the energy intensive industries such as petroleum refineries, coal and lignite mining, manufacturing industries, and transport are the key contributing sectors to the GDP losses. The price of carbon mitigation would shoot up to reach USD 734 per tCO 2 eq in 2050 from USD 14 per tCO 2 eq in 2025 to attain net-zero emissions in 2050., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestPornphimol Winyuchakrit and Piti Pita declare they have no financial interests., (© The Author(s) 2023.)