Plans to cut carbon dioxide will not be enough to meet Paris Agreement targets, research shows

New research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggests that current decarbonisation plans will not be enough to meet the Paris Agreement’s targets of limiting global warming to 1.5C. . The scientists came to this conclusion by measuring the “emissions gap” between different national climate protection plans and what is actually needed to achieve that goal.

This first-of-its-kind study found a gap of up to 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) between current global plans to remove carbon from the atmosphere and what is needed by 2050 to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. These impacts include heat waves, floods, droughts, melting ice and rising sea levels.

Since 2010, the United Nations environmental organization UNEP has undertaken similar measurements of this emissions gap. The UEA research, which focuses primarily on CO2 removal, shows that climate policy requires a more ambitious scope if we are to survive as a species.

This means a more nuanced and robust approach that still supports current decarbonisation practices, but with a renewed focus on reducing emissions, renewable energy and minimizing deforestation. There are also new decarbonization options that many nations have been slow to discuss, let alone implement.

These include advanced air filter systems and . The latter is a technique where carbon is removed from the atmosphere and stored in rocks. These techniques account for the removal of only 0.002 billion tons of CO2 per year, compared to 3 billion tons through conventional options. The research shows that these new options need to become more common in the coming years to help meet that 1.5C threshold.

“The calculation certainly needs to be refined,” said lead study author Dr. William Lamb of the MCC Applied Sustainability Science Working Group. “This much is clear: without rapidly reducing emissions to zero, across all sectors, the 1.5C limit will not be met under any circumstances.”

Co-author Dr Naomi Vaughan of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at UEA added that “countries need more awareness, ambition and action to scale up carbon removal methods alongside deep emissions reductions to achieve the aspirations of the Paris Agreement.”

To that end, even if each country sticks to its promises regarding carbon removal targets, the amount of carbon removed is likely to increase by a maximum of 0.5 billion tons by 2030 and 1.9 billion tons by 2050. The latter reported that an increase in removals of 5.1 billion tonnes would be needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change. So yes, there is this difference of 3.2 billion tonnes.

We are not doomed, at least not yet. The IPCC proposes an alternative scenario where governments around the world work together to reduce global energy demand, fueled by “politically motivated behaviour”. Under this scenario, carbon removal would increase by 2.5 billion tons by 2050, and alternative methods would help reduce the emissions gap to just 400 million tons. So essentially we need to move our entire society from a self-interest society to a global cooperation society. It never hurts to dream and, hey, maybe AI will swoop in and save us.

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