Measuring a fair and ambitious climate agreement using cumulative emissions

By G. P. Peters, Robbie M. Andrew, S. Solomon, Pierre Friedlingstein. 2015

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Policy makers have called for a ‘fair and ambitious’ global climate agreement. Scientific constraints, such as the allowable carbon emissions to avoid exceeding a 2 °C global warming limit with 66% probability, can help define ambitious approaches to climate targets. However, fairly sharing the mitigation challenge to meet a global target involves human values rather than just scientific facts. We develop a framework based on cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide to compare the consistency of countries’ current emission pledges to the ambition of keeping global temperatures below 2 °C, and, further, compare two alternative methods of sharing the remaining emission allowance. We focus on the recent pledges and other official statements of the EU, USA, and China. The EU and US pledges are close to a 2 °C level of ambition only if the remaining emission allowance is distributed based on current emission shares, which is unlikely to be viewed as ‘fair and ambitious’ by others who presently emit less. China’s stated emissions target also differs from measures of global fairness, owing to emissions that continue to grow into the 2020s. We find that, combined, the EU, US, and Chinese pledges leave little room for other countries to emit CO2 if a 2 °C limit is the objective, essentially requiring all other countries to move towards per capita emissions 7 to 14 times lower than the EU, USA, or China by 2030. We argue that a fair and ambitious agreement for a 2 °C limit that would be globally inclusive and effective in the long term will require stronger mitigation than the goals currently proposed. Given such necessary and unprecedented mitigation and the current lack of availability of some key technologies, we suggest a new diplomatic effort directed at ensuring that the necessary technologies become available in the near future.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d5ea8ad373b7faec26c7f4c3c85adb8998d2513a

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

1. J. Kuriakose
2. A. Larkin
3. Maria Sharmina
4. P. Stoknes
5. Kevin Anderson
6. J. Rockström
7. Wim Carton

In Environmental Engineering

1. Kevin Anderson
2. J. Rockström

In Global and Planetary Change

1. J. Kuriakose
2. Kevin Anderson
3. A. Larkin
4. J. Rockström
5. Maria Sharmina
6. Wim Carton

Citations in the corpus

• What if negative emission technologies fail at scale? Implications of the Paris Agreement for big emitting nations (2018, result): “All scenario pathways illustrated have sustained CO2 reductions that exceed the 4% p.a. rate typical of 2°C scenarios in the literature, but consistent with budget-focused analysis of Raupach et al. (2014) and Peters et al. (2015).”
• Redefining green growth within planetary boundaries (2018, background): “To attain genuine green growth in the climate dimension the economic challenge is, then, how to break down the remaining global carbon budget (Greaker et al., 2013; Meinshausen et al., 2009; Peters et al., 2015; van Vuuren et al., 2016) to a fair and clear share for each nation state, city, industry”