Published May 18, 2023 | Version 1.0
Journal article Open

A multimodel analysis of post-Glasgow climate targets and feasibility challenges

Authors/Creators

  • 1. Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), Leioa, Spain
  • 2. Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London, London, UK
  • 3. Center for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, London, UK
  • 4. Energy Policy Unit, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece
  • 5. Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK
  • 6. Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, College Park, MD, USA
  • 7. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland
  • 8. CICERO Center for International Climate Research, Oslo, Norway

Description

The COP26 Glasgow process resulted in many countries strengthening their 2030 emissions reduction targets and announcing net-zero pledges for 2050–2070 but it is not clear how this would impact future warming. Here, we use four diverse integrated assessment models (IAMs) to assess CO2 emission trajectories in the near- and long-term on the basis of national policies and pledges, combined with a non-CO2 infilling model and a simple climate model to assess the temperature implications. We also consider the feasibility of national long-term pledges towards net-zero. While near-term pledges alone lead to warming above 2 °C, the addition of long-term pledges leads to emissions trajectories compatible with a future well below 2 °C, across all four IAMs. However, while IAM heterogeneity translates to diverse decarbonization pathways towards long-term targets, all modelled pathways indicate several feasibility concerns, relating to the cost of mitigation and the rates and scales of deployed technologies and measures.

The paper is fully available to read (open access) via this link: https://rdcu.be/dcGOU

Notes

Aside from "IAM COMPACT" (Grant No. 101056306), the authors also gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the H2020 PARIS REINFORCE project (Grant No. 820846).

Files

FAM_A multimodel analysis of post-Glasgow climate targets and feasibility challenges.pdf

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Additional details

Related works

Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.7767193 (DOI)

Funding

European Commission
PARIS REINFORCE - Delivering on the Paris Agreement: A demand-driven, integrated assessment modelling approach 820846
European Commission
IAM COMPACT - Expanding Integrated Assessment Modelling: Comprehensive and Comprehensible Science for Sustainable, Co-Created Climate Action 101056306