Paris climate agreement plans don’t match Paris agreement goals

(credit: Arnaud Bouissou- MEDDE/SG COP21)

If anyone thought that December’s historic Paris climate agreement meant the problem of climate change was officially solved, they got the wrong idea. While a critical first step, the emissions cuts pledged cannot be the end of the story if we want to stabilize our unintentional experiment with Earth’s climate.

Technically, the 195 countries in on the pact are agreeing to keep global average temperatures less than 2°C above pre-industrial times. In fact, a late addition to the agreement purports to aim to stay below 1.5°C above. Unfortunately, it now seems that the actual emissions pledges submitted by each nation (which go through 2030) don’t get us there.

A team led by Joeri Rogelj of Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has published a close look at those pledges to show us just where we’re at. They compare several scenarios for future greenhouse gas emissions: a baseline “no policy” world in which no cuts are made, a world in which only existing (pre-Paris) policies are in effect, a Paris Agreement scenario, and a more aggressive scenario that would obey the 2°C limit.

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