Cost and attainability of meeting stringent climate targets without overshoot

Global emissions scenarios play a critical role in the assessment of strategies to mitigate climate change. The current scenarios, however, are criticized because they feature strategies with pronounced overshoot of the global temperature goal, requiring a long-term repair phase to draw temperatures down again through net-negative emissions. Some impacts might not be reversible. Hence, we explore a new set of net-zero CO2 emissions scenarios with limited overshoot. We show that upfront investments are needed in the near term for limiting temperature overshoot but that these would bring long-term economic gains. Our study further identifies alternative configurations of net-zero CO2 emissions systems and the roles of different sectors and regions for balancing sources and sinks. Even without net-negative emissions, CO2 removal is important for accelerating near-term reductions and for providing an anthropogenic sink that can offset the residual emissions in sectors that are hard to abate.

RIAHI Keywan;  BERTRAM Christoph;  HUPPMANN Daniel;  ROGELJ Joeri;  BOSETTI Valentina;  CABARDOS Anique-Marie;  DEPPERMANN Andre;  DROUET Laurent;  FRANK Stefan;  FRICKO Oliver;  FUJIMORI Shinichiro;  HARMSEN J.H. Mathijs;  HASEGAWA Tomoko;  KREY Volker;  LUDERER Gunnar;  PAROUSSOS Leonidas;  SCHAEFFER Roberto;  WEITZEL Matthias;  VAN DER ZWAAN Bob;  VRONTISI Zoi;  DALLA LONGA Francesco;  DESPRÉS Jacques;  FOSSE Florian;  FRAGKIADAKIS Kostas;  GUSTI Mykola;  HUMPENODER Florian;  KERAMIDAS Kimon;  KISHIMOTO Paul;  KRIEGLER Elmar;  MEINSHAUSEN Malte;  NOGUEIRA Larissa P.P.;  OSHIRO Ken;  POPP Alexander;  ROCHEDO Pedro R R;  UNLU Gamze;  VAN RUIJVEN Bas;  TAKAKURA Jun'Ya;  TAVONI Massimo;  VAN VUUREN Detlef;  ZAKERI Behnam; 

2021-12-13

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP

JRC123468

1758-678X (online),   

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01215-2,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC123468,   

10.1038/s41558-021-01215-2 (online),