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.

Authors

PBL Authors
Detlef van Vuuren Mathijs Harmsen
Other authors
Keywan Riahi et.al.

Specifications

Publication title
Cost and attainability of meeting stringent climate targets without overshoot
Publication date
29 November 2021
Publication type
Article
Publication language
English
Magazine
Nature Climate Change
Issue
volume 11, pages1063–1069 (2021)
Product number
4871