A new scenario logic for the Paris Agreement long-term temperature goal

By Joeri Rogelj, D. Huppmann, Volker Krey, Keywan Riahi, Leon Clarke, M. Gidden, Z. Nicholls, Malte Meinshausen. Nature, 2019

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To understand how global warming can be kept well below 2 degrees Celsius and even 1.5 degrees Celsius, climate policy uses scenarios that describe how society could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. However, current scenarios have a key weakness: they typically focus on reaching specific climate goals in 2100. This choice may encourage risky pathways that delay action, reach higher-than-acceptable mid-century warming, and rely on net removal of carbon dioxide thereafter to undo their initial shortfall in reductions of emissions. Here we draw on insights from physical science to propose a scenario framework that focuses on capping global warming at a specific maximum level with either temperature stabilization or reversal thereafter. The ambition of climate action until carbon neutrality determines peak warming, and can be followed by a variety of long-term states with different sustainability implications. The approach proposed here closely mirrors the intentions of the United Nations Paris Agreement, and makes questions of intergenerational equity into explicit design choices. Fundamental value judgments about acceptable maximum levels of climate change and future reliance on controversial technologies can be made explicitly in climate scenarios, thereby addressing the intergenerational bias present in the scenario literature.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b98f04142381e0341dd2a317e54d2ba67634938

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Environmental Engineering

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “…landbased ‘natural climate solutions’ (Griscom et al 2017) or negative emission technologies (Fuss et al 2018, Minx et al 2018, Nemet et al 2018, Rogelj et al 2019), are required after 2050 to bring the climate back from an overshoot over the climate-change mitigation targets to the specified…”
Quantifying the potential scale of mitigation deterrence from greenhouse gas removal techniques (2020, background): “Consistently constraining models to avoid overshoots would be one helpful approach (Rogelj et al. 2019b).”