Dataset Information

Warming assessment of the bottom-up Paris Agreement emissions pledges.

ABSTRACT: Under the bottom-up architecture of the Paris Agreement, countries pledge Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Current NDCs individually align, at best, with divergent concepts of equity and are collectively inconsistent with the Paris Agreement. We show that the global 2030-emissions of NDCs match the sum of each country adopting the least-stringent of five effort-sharing allocations of a well-below 2?°C-scenario. Extending such a self-interested bottom-up aggregation of equity might lead to a median 2100-warming of 2.3?°C. Tightening the warming goal of each country's effort-sharing approach to aspirational levels of 1.1?°C and 1.3?°C could achieve the 1.5?°C and well-below 2?°C-thresholds, respectively. This new hybrid allocation reconciles the bottom-up nature of the Paris Agreement with its top-down warming thresholds and provides a temperature metric to assess NDCs. When taken as benchmark by other countries, the NDCs of India, the EU, the USA and China lead to 2.6?°C, 3.2?°C, 4?°C and over 5.1?°C warmings, respectively.

SUBMITTER: Robiou du Pont Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6240108 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Warming assessment of the bottom-up Paris Agreement emissions pledges.

Robiou du Pont Yann Y Meinshausen Malte M

Nature communications 20181116 1

Under the bottom-up architecture of the Paris Agreement, countries pledge Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Current NDCs individually align, at best, with divergent concepts of equity and are collectively inconsistent with the Paris Agreement. We show that the global 2030-emissions of NDCs match the sum of each country adopting the least-stringent of five effort-sharing allocations of a well-below 2 °C-scenario. Extending such a self-interested bottom-up aggregation of equity might lea ...[more]

PMID: 30446653

Similar Datasets

Project description:The concept of “committed emissions” allows us to understand what proportion of the Paris-constrained and rapidly diminishing global carbon dioxide (CO2) budget is potentially taken up by existing infrastructure. Here, this concept is applied to international shipping, where long-lived assets increase the likelihood for high levels of committed emissions. To date, committed emissions studies have focussed predominantly on the power sector, or on global analyses in which shipping is a small element, with assumptions of asset lifetimes extrapolated from other transport modes. This study analyses new CO2, ship age and scrappage datasets covering the 11,000 ships included in the European Union’s new emissions monitoring scheme (EU MRV), to deliver original insights on the speed at which new and existing shipping infrastructure must be decarbonised. These results, using ship-specific assumptions on asset lifetimes, show higher committed emissions for shipping than previous estimates based on asset lifetimes similar to the road transport sector. The estimated baseline committed emissions value is equivalent to 85–212% of the carbon budget for 1.5 °C that is available for these EU MRV ships, with the central case exceeding the available carbon budget. The sector does, however, have significant potential to reduce this committed emissions figure without premature scrappage through a combination of slow speeds, operational and technical efficiency measures, and the timely retrofitting of ships to use zero-carbon fuels. Here, it is shown that if mitigation measures are applied comprehensively through strong and rapid policy implementation in the 2020s, and if zero-carbon ships are deployed rapidly from 2030, it is still possible for the ships in the EU MRV system to stay within 1.5 °C carbon budgets. Alongside this, as there are wide variations between and within ship types, this new analysis sheds light on opportunities for decision-makers to tailor policy interventions to deliver more effective CO2 mitigation. Delays to appropriately stringent policy implementation would mean additional measures, such as premature scrappage or curbing the growth in shipping tonne-km, become necessary to meet the Paris climate goals.

Dataset Information

Warming assessment of the bottom-up Paris Agreement emissions pledges.

Publications

Warming assessment of the bottom-up Paris Agreement emissions pledges.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets