The U.N. climate report’s emissions pathways – decoded

  • April 5, 2022
  • Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
  • Category: DPN Topics
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The U.N. climate report’s emissions pathways – decoded

Subject: Environment

Section: Climate Change

Context- The U.N. climate science panel report released on Monday lays out several paths for greenhouse gas emissions that could limit climate change or, alternatively, see it spiral out of control.

Concept-

  • The United Nations’ climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the third instalment of its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) April 4, 2022.
  • The report prepared by the IPCC Working Group III (WG-III) focuses on the mitigation of climate change, ie, the solutions necessary to halt global warming.
  • six takeaways from the SPM titled the Summary for Policymakers:
    1. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were 54 per cent higher in 2019 than they were in 1990, but growth is slowing.
    2. Least developed countries emitted only 3.3 per cent of global emissions in 2019.
    3. Pledges to the Paris Agreement are insufficient, emissions must fall 43 per cent by 2030 compared to 2019.
    4. Abundant and affordable solutions exist across sectors including energy, buildings, and transport, as well as individual behavioural changes.
    5. The impact on GDP would be negligible and the long-term benefits of cutting emissions immediately would outweigh the initial costs.
    6. Finance falls short, especially in developing countries, but there is sufficient money in the world to close this gap.
  • The pathways for mitigating Cimate change:
MOST OPTIMISTICOnly two categories of pathways – dubbed “C1” and “C2” in the report – could keep the world to its 2015 Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius of preindustrial temperatures.

 

The world would need to invest big in renewable energy and make dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in this decade, including a massive scale back in use of coal, oil and gas.

Some carbon dioxide (CO2) would also need to be removed from the atmosphere through increasing global forest cover as well as with nascent technologies such as direct air capture.

These pathways would see emissions peak by 2025, and net-zero CO2 emissions by 2060.

MORE FEASIBLE

 

More-realistic “C3” and “C4” pathways could restrict warming to 2° C – but only if governments quickly enact and expand their current national climate plans.These paths envision net-zero for CO2 by 2085, but some could fail to reach net-zero for all greenhouse gas emissions in this century.

 

CURRENT TRACK“C5” to “C7” pathways describe doing little beyond what’s planned as of today, and would see the average global temperature rise of 2.1° C to 3.5° C by 2100, and continue rising in the next century.These mirror what national climate policies as of 2020 would achieve if not strengthened by 2030, with the world warming by about 3.2° C.
WORST CASEIn the worst case scenarios, described as “C8” pathways, the world warms more than 4° C beyond preindustrial temperatures.Emissions increase dramatically as current climate policies are reversed and low-carbon technologies such as renewable energy sources and electric vehicles are rolled back.
Environment The U.N. climate report's emissions pathways - decoded