Economic disparity among generations under the Paris Agreement.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Yang H
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8492698 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Similar Datasets
Project description:Understanding the implications of global climate governance is critical for achieving sustainable economic development, given that the economic impacts of climate change and policies are disproportionately distributed across regions. We estimate the updated damage functions and construct an uncertainty analysis framework to assess whether stringent climate policies entail economic benefits in terms of growth and inequality. The findings show that although climate policies slow the pace of economic growth, the benefits of avoided damage may overweight policy costs in the long run. Moreover, pursuing the 1.5°C goal slows economic catch-up of poor countries in the short to medium term relative to 2°C, but improves global inequality in the long run. This situation may, however, change when moving to a fast-growing and fossil-fueled world, in which inequalities gradually decline but start to rise after 2065. This study highlights the importance of synergizing the stringent 1.5°C goal with economic inequality alleviation.
| S-EPMC9792906 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) represent the world's first effort toward the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global temperature increase well below 2 °C and pursuing 1.5 °C. Little is known about how much the proposed mitigation efforts can reduce the risks and economic damages from unabated climate change and about the consequences if key emitters drop the Paris Agreement. Here, we use CLIMRISK, an integrated assessment model designed to support climate policy at the global, national, and subnational scales where mitigation and adaptation policy decisions are made. We characterize the consequences of unabated climate change and the benefits of current climate policy proposals by means of probabilistic estimates of the economic damages of climate change and uni- and multivariate dynamic climate risk indices at a detailed spatial resolution. The results presented reveal that the economic costs and risks are highly unequally distributed between and within countries and larger than previously estimated when warming in urban areas and temporal persistence of impacts are accounted for. Costs and risks can be significantly limited by strict implementation of NDCs, but increase noticeably under noncompliance by large emitters, like the United States.
| S-EPMC9292546 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The Paris Agreement binds all nations to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change, with the commitment to Bhold warming well below 2 °C in global mean temperature (GMT), relative to pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5 °C". The 1.5 °C limit constitutes an ambitious goal for which greater evidence on its benefits for health would help guide policy and potentially increase the motivation for action. Here we contribute to this gap with an assessment on the potential health benefits, in terms of reductions in temperature-related mortality, derived from the compliance to the agreed temperature targets, compared to more extreme warming scenarios. We performed a multi-region analysis in 451 locations in 23 countries with different climate zones, and evaluated changes in heat and cold-related mortality under scenarios consistent with the Paris Agreement targets (1.5 and 2 °C) and more extreme GMT increases (3 and 4 °C), and under the assumption of no changes in demographic distribution and vulnerability. Our results suggest that limiting warming below 2 °C could prevent large increases in temperature-related mortality in most regions worldwide. The comparison between 1.5 and 2 °C is more complex and characterized by higher uncertainty, with geographical differences that indicate potential benefits limited to areas located in warmer climates, where direct climate change impacts will be more discernible.
| S-EPMC6217994 | biostudies-literature
Project description:With the changes in global temperature and humidity, heat stress is expected to intensify in the coming decades. Under the scenario that greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing until the end of this century, there is the possibility of extensive global exposure to high heat stress. While under new mitigation efforts (as part of the Paris Agreement, signatory nations pledged to implement the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) for emission reductions), the regional response of heat stress to pledged emission reductions remains unclear. In this study, we analyze the heat stress response in global hotspot regions, targeting emission scenarios resulting from the INDCs pledges. Our study revealed that under the INDCs-continuous mitigation, the heat stress effect in global hotspot regions (North China, South Asia, and the Amazon) is estimated to be lower than 29 °C in the next three decades and to be from >33 °C to less than 30 °C to this century end. The heat stress effect indicates a great reduction at the continuous mitigation compared with the delayed mitigation, and the population exposed to dangerous heat stress would also decrease approximately one order of magnitude. If limiting warming to a lesser amount (1.5/2 °C targets), significantly further reduction of the population exposed to heat stress in the middle and low latitudes can be achieved, thus avoiding the adverse effects associated with heat stress. Therefore, the national intended mitigation actions under the Paris Agreement will play a crucial role in reducing the heat stress risk in these hot and humid regions. These findings will help to improve the understanding of the future risks of heat stress and are crucial for mitigation and adaptation actions in hotspot areas (approximately 1/3 of the world's population).
| S-EPMC6616907 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Sea-level rise is a major consequence of climate change that will continue long after emissions of greenhouse gases have stopped. The 2015 Paris Agreement aims at reducing climate-related risks by reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero and limiting global-mean temperature increase. Here we quantify the effect of these constraints on global sea-level rise until 2300, including Antarctic ice-sheet instabilities. We estimate median sea-level rise between 0.7 and 1.2 m, if net-zero greenhouse gas emissions are sustained until 2300, varying with the pathway of emissions during this century. Temperature stabilization below 2 °C is insufficient to hold median sea-level rise until 2300 below 1.5 m. We find that each 5-year delay in near-term peaking of CO2 emissions increases median year 2300 sea-level rise estimates by ca. 0.2 m, and extreme sea-level rise estimates at the 95th percentile by up to 1 m. Our results underline the importance of near-term mitigation action for limiting long-term sea-level rise risks.
| S-EPMC5820313 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories represent the link between national and international political actions on climate change, and climate and environmental sciences. Inventory agencies need to include, in national GHG inventories, emission and removal estimates based on scientific data following specific reporting guidance under the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement, using the methodologies defined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines. Often however, research communities and inventory agencies have approached the problem of climate change from different angles and by using terminologies, metrics, rules and approaches that do not always match. This is particularly true dealing with "Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry" (LULUCF), the most challenging among the inventory sectors to deal with, mainly because of high level of complexity of its carbon dynamics and the difficulties in disaggregating the fluxes between those caused by natural and anthropogenic processes. In this paper, we facilitate the understanding by research communities of the current (UNFCCC) and future (under the Paris Agreement) reporting requirements, and we identify the main issues and topics that should be considered when targeting improvement of the GHG inventory. In relation to these topics, we describe where and how the research community can contribute to producing useful inputs, data, methods and solutions for inventory agencies and policy makers, on the basis of available literature. However, a greater effort by both communities is desirable for closer cooperation and collaboration, for data sharing and the understanding of respective and common aims.
| S-EPMC8171125 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The Paris Climate Agreement aims to keep temperature rise well below 2?°C. This implies mitigation costs as well as avoided climate damages. Here we show that independent of the normative assumptions of inequality aversion and time preferences, the agreement constitutes the economically optimal policy pathway for the century. To this end we consistently incorporate a damage-cost curve reproducing the observed relation between temperature and economic growth into the integrated assessment model DICE. We thus provide an inter-temporally optimizing cost-benefit analysis of this century's climate problem. We account for uncertainties regarding the damage curve, climate sensitivity, socioeconomic future, and mitigation costs. The resulting optimal temperature is robust as can be understood from the generic temperature-dependence of the mitigation costs and the level of damages inferred from the observed temperature-growth relationship. Our results show that the politically motivated Paris Climate Agreement also represents the economically favourable pathway, if carried out properly.
| S-EPMC6985261 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The UN Paris Agreement puts in place a legally binding mechanism to increase mitigation action over time. Countries put forward pledges called nationally determined contributions (NDC) whose impact is assessed in global stocktaking exercises. Subsequently, actions can then be strengthened in light of the Paris climate objective: limiting global mean temperature increase to well below 2 °C and pursuing efforts to limit it further to 1.5 °C. However, pledged actions are currently described ambiguously and this complicates the global stocktaking exercise. Here, we systematically explore possible interpretations of NDC assumptions, and show that this results in estimated emissions for 2030 ranging from 47 to 63 GtCO2e yr-1. We show that this uncertainty has critical implications for the feasibility and cost to limit warming well below 2 °C and further to 1.5 °C. Countries are currently working towards clarifying the modalities of future NDCs. We identify salient avenues to reduce the overall uncertainty by about 10 percentage points through simple, technical clarifications regarding energy accounting rules. Remaining uncertainties depend to a large extent on politically valid choices about how NDCs are expressed, and therefore raise the importance of a thorough and robust process that keeps track of where emissions are heading over time.
| S-EPMC5467211 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In the Glasgow COP26, several major emitters have announced new climate neutrality commitments. Others revised their nationally determined contributions (NDC). The climate, energy, and economic repercussion of these revised pledges is still unclear. Here, using a detailed-process integrated assessment model (WITCH), we analyze the impact of the Glasgow net-zero commitments and compare it to scenarios consistent with the Paris' agreement. We find that-if fully implemented-the Glasgow strategies would help close the gap to 2 ° C , covering more than 80% of the world's needed emission reductions by 2070. The pledged commitments would exceed 1.5°C, with a temperature increase (50% likelihood) of 1.6 ° C- 1.8 ° C by the end of the century. We find that the Glasgow net-zero pledges would require substantial increases in investment in electric transportation and power generation in all major economies. Compared to a scenario with uniform carbon taxation, Glasgow differentiated pledges' do not significantly increase global policy costs, are more fair, and save more lives by promoting cleaner air. However, they delay coal phase-out and increase the need for negative emission technologies.
| S-EPMC9883194 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Projections of global warming in Africa are generally associated with increasing aridity and decreasing water availability. However, most freshwater assessments focus on single hydroclimatic indicators (e.g., runoff, precipitation, or aridity), lacking analysis on combined changes in evaporative demand, and water availability on land. There remains a high degree of uncertainty over water implications at the basin scale, in particular for the most water-consuming sector-food production. Using the Budyko framework, we perform an assessment of future hydroclimatic change for the 50 largest African basins, finding a consistent pattern of change in four distinct regions across the two main emission scenarios corresponding to the Paris Agreement, and the business as usual. Although the Paris Agreement is likely to lead to less intense changes when compared to the business as usual, both scenarios show the same pattern of hydroclimatic shifts, suggesting a potential roadmap for hydroclimatic adaptation. We discuss the social-ecological implications of the projected hydroclimatic shifts in the four regions and argue that climate policies need to be complemented by soil and water conservation practices to make the best use of future water resources.
| S-EPMC7534178 | biostudies-literature