Carbon Lock-in Curves and Southeast Asia: Implications for the Paris Agreement

01 October 2018

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Carbon Lock-in Curves (CLICs) are a new method we have created to objectively assess the carbon budget implications of current and planned assets. CLICs create a way to order, optimise, and represent portfolios of assets based on their committed emissions or future ‘carbon lock-in’. Cumulative committed emissions across assets are compared to carbon budgets to determine which assets are compatible (or incompatible) with a given budget. Assets that are incompatible with carbon budgets face a higher risk of stranding due to action on climate change. CLICs allow companies, policymakers, financial institutions, governments, regulators, and civil society to see whether current or proposed assets are compatible with different climate pathways and how this could change over time. This report introduces CLICs and applies the approach to analyse the compatibility of power generating assets in Southeast Asia with global and country-level carbon budgets.