Zero emission targets as long-term global goals for climate protection

By Joeri Rogelj, M. Schaeffer, Malte Meinshausen, Reto Knutti, Joseph Alcamo, Keywan Riahi, W. Hare. 2015

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, assessments have robustly linked stabilization of global-mean temperature rise to the necessity of limiting the total amount of emitted carbon-dioxide (CO2). Halting global warming thus requires virtually zero annual CO2 emissions at some point. Policymakers have now incorporated this concept in the negotiating text for a new global climate agreement, but confusion remains about concepts like carbon neutrality, climate neutrality, full decarbonization, and net zero carbon or net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Here we clarify these concepts, discuss their appropriateness to serve as a long-term global benchmark for achieving temperature targets, and provide a detailed quantification. We find that with current pledges and for a likely (>66%) chance of staying below 2 °C, the scenario literature suggests net zero CO2 emissions between 2060 and 2070, with net negative CO2 emissions thereafter. Because of residual non-CO2 emissions, net zero is always reached later for total GHG emissions than for CO2. Net zero emissions targets are a useful focal point for policy, linking a global temperature target and socio-economic pathways to a necessary long-term limit on cumulative CO2 emissions.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a680d295e0f26573dd288e79aa877502de38a36

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Citations in the corpus

Net-zero emissions energy systems (2018, background): “Meanwhile, net emissions of carbondioxide (CO2) from human activities—including not only energy and industrial production, but also land use and agriculture—must approach zero to stabilize global mean temperature (2, 3).”
Committed emissions from existing energy infrastructure jeopardize 1.5 °C climate target (2019, background): “com/platts/en/productsservices/electric-power/world-electric-power-plants-database, (3) the CARMA database: http://carma.”
Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects (2018, methodology): “All available scenarios hence show net negative cumulative emissions budgets for the second half of the 21st century (2050–2100) (Rogelj et al 2015a, 2018) or even in the longer run until 2300 (Akimoto et al 2017).”
The Paris Agreement zero-emissions goal is not always consistent with the 1.5 °C and 2 °C temperature targets (2018, methodology): “This research was partially supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-1702) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency, Japan.”