Warming assessment of the bottom-up Paris Agreement emissions pledges

• Published in: Nature communications 2018-11, Vol.9 (1), p.4810-10, Article 4810
• Main Authors: Robiou du Pont, Yann, Meinshausen, Malte
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 704/106/694/682; 706/689/694/682; Allocations; Emissions; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Paris Agreement; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Thresholds
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07223-9

Under the bottom-up architecture of the Paris Agreement, countries pledge Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Current NDCs individually align, at best, with divergent concepts of equity and are collectively inconsistent with the Paris Agreement. We show that the global 2030-emissions of NDCs match the sum of each country adopting the least-stringent of five effort-sharing allocations of a well-below 2 °C-scenario. Extending such a self-interested bottom-up aggregation of equity might lead to a median 2100-warming of 2.3 °C. Tightening the warming goal of each country’s effort-sharing approach to aspirational levels of 1.1 °C and 1.3 °C could achieve the 1.5 °C and well-below 2 °C-thresholds, respectively. This new hybrid allocation reconciles the bottom-up nature of the Paris Agreement with its top-down warming thresholds and provides a temperature metric to assess NDCs. When taken as benchmark by other countries, the NDCs of India, the EU, the USA and China lead to 2.6 °C, 3.2 °C, 4 °C and over 5.1 °C warmings, respectively. The Paris Agreement includes bottom-up pledges and top-down warming threshold. Under this setting where countries effectively choose their own fairness principle, this article assesses the global warming implied by each Nationally Determined Contribution to inform the future ratcheting-up process.