Critical adjustment of land mitigation pathways for assessing countries’ climate progress

Mitigation pathways by Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) describe future emissions that keep global warming below specific temperature limits and are compared with countries’ collective greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction pledges. This is needed to assess mitigation progress and inform emission targets under the Paris Agreement. 

Currently, however, a mismatch of ~5.5 GtCO2 yr−1 exists between the global land-use fluxes estimated with IAMs and from countries’ GHG inventories. Here we present a ‘Rosetta stone’ adjustment to translate IAMs’ land-use mitigation pathways to estimates more comparable with GHG inventories.

This does not change the original decarbonization pathways, but reallocates part of the land sink to be consistent with GHG inventories. Adjusted cumulative emissions over the period until net zero for 1.5 or 2 °C limits are reduced by 120–192 GtCO2 relative to the original IAM pathways. These differences should be taken into account to ensure an accurate assessment of progress towards the Paris Agreement.

This article is available on the publisher’s website via restricted access.

Authors

PBL Authors
Detlef van Vuuren Elke Stehfest
Other authors
Giacomo Grassi
Joeri Rogelj
Alessandro Cescatti
Jo House
Gert-Jan Nabuurs
Simone Rossi
Ramdane Alkama
Raúl Abad Viñas
Katherine Calvin
Guido Ceccherini
Sandro Federici
Shinichiro Fujimori
Mykola Gusti
Tomoko Hasegawa
Petr Havlik
Florian Humpenöder
Anu Korosuo
Lucia Perugini
Francesco N. Tubiello
Alexander Popp

Specifications

Publication title
Critical adjustment of land mitigation pathways for assessing countries’ climate progress
Publication date
26 April 2021
Publication type
Article
Publication language
English
Magazine
Nature Climate Change
Issue
11, pages 425–434 (2021)
Product number
4642