Policy guidance and pitfalls aligning IPCC scenarios to national land emissions inventories

Gidden, Matthew; Gasser, Thomas; Grassi, Giacomo; Forsell, Nicklas; Janssens, Iris; Lamb, William F.; Minx, Jan; Nicholls, Zebedee; Steinhauser, Jan; Riahi, Keywan

doi:10.1002/essoar.10512676.2

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Thirdly, and finally, they highlight that resolving uncertainties in the measurement of LULUCF fluxes will be essential to determining the sufficiency of CDR deployment efforts going forward. Specifically, both national inventories and IAM-derived mitigation scenarios should provide detailed information regarding the evolution of forest area, subdivided by forest type [63] as well as the gross carbon fluxes (i.e. positive and negative, human-caused and indirect) resulting from the assumed changes in forest area, following a common framework that would enable like-for-like comparison [56].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying global carbon dioxide removal deployment

Powis

Smith

Minx

et al. 2023

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Despite the importance of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) in most climate change mitigation scenarios that limit warming to well below 2°C, the study of CDR is still a nascent field with basic questions to be resolved. Crucially, it is not known how much CDR is currently deployed at a global scale, nor how that compares to mitigation scenario estimates. Here, we address this problem by developing an estimate of global current CDR activity. We draw on national greenhouse gas inventory data combined with CDR registries and commercial databases to estimate that global anthropogenic activity presently generates ~1985 MtCO2yr-1 of atmospheric removals. Almost all of these - 1983 MtCO2yr-1- are removals from land-use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF). Non-land-management CDR projects such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture with carbon capture and storage (DACCS) and biochar remove only about 2 MtCO2yr-1.We compare this estimate with Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) projections of CDR deployed in “well-below 2°C” mitigation pathways. In so doing we demonstrate current CDR deployment would need to grow exponentially to keep the world aligned with most “well-below 2°C” scenarios, which see CDR deployment growing between 75 and 100% per year between 2020 and 2030, adding ~300-2500 MtCO2 in total CDR capacity. To conclude we discuss uncertainties related to our estimates, and suggest priorities for the future collection and management of CDR data, particularly related to the role of the land sink in generating CDR.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantifying global carbon dioxide removal deployment

Powis

Smith

Minx

et al. 2023

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…One area of needed improvement is to separate gross LULUCF emissions and removals in scenario reporting -information that we have sourced here from a re-analysis of the AR6 scenario database 20 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We use the scenario re-analysis provided by Gidden et al 20 that splits emissions and removals in the land use sector. Their analysis is conducted by running the OSCAR bookkeeping model using variables reported in the AR6 scenario database -including forest land area, cropland area and forestry activity -to evaluate the direct anthropogenic removals on managed land.…”

Section: Scenario Selection and Re-analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While novel CDR such as BECCS is reported in the AR6 scenario database, conventional CDR on land is only inconsistently reported as afforestation and instead tends to be combined with emissions as a net LULUCF ux. We therefore use a novel re-analysis of the IPCC database using the OSCAR model that extracts the removal component of the LULUCF ux in each scenario corresponding to our de nition of conventional CDR on land (see methods) 20 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The carbon dioxide removal gap

Lamb

Gasser

Grassi

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Rapid emissions reductions, including reductions in deforestation-based land emissions, are the dominant source of global mitigation potential in the coming decades 1. But in addition, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will have an important role to play. Here we benchmark proposed CDR in the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the long-term mitigation strategies against levels in integrated assessment scenarios that meet the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. Our analysis finds a “CDR gap”, i.e. levels proposed by countries fall short of those in virtually all scenarios that limit warming to 1.5°C - including in low energy demand scenarios with the most limited CDR scaling and aggressive near-term emissions reductions. Further, we observe that many countries propose to expand land-based removals, but none yet commit to significantly scaling novel methods such as bioenergy carbon capture and storage, biochar, or direct air carbon capture and storage.

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Country-level estimates of gross and net carbon fluxes from land use, land-use change and forestry

Obermeier,

Schwingshackl,

Bastos

et al. 2024

Earth Syst. Sci. Data

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Abstract. The reduction of CO2 emissions and the enhancement of CO2 removals related to land use are considered essential for future pathways towards net-zero emissions and mitigating climate change. With the growing pressure under global climate treaties, country-level land-use CO2 flux data are becoming increasingly important. So far, country-level estimates are mainly available through official country reports, such as the greenhouse gas inventories reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Recently, different modelling approaches, namely dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) and bookkeeping models, have moved to higher spatial resolutions, which makes it possible to obtain model-based country-level estimates that are globally consistent in their methodology. To progress towards a largely independent assessment of country reports using models, we analyse the robustness of country-level CO2 flux estimates from different modelling approaches in the period 1950–2021 and compare them with estimates from country reports. Our results highlight the general ability of modelling approaches to estimate land-use CO2 fluxes at the country level and at higher spatial resolution. Modelled land-use CO2 flux estimates generally agree well, but the investigation of multiple DGVMs and bookkeeping models reveals that the robustness of their estimates strongly varies across countries, and substantial uncertainties remain, even for top emitters. Similarly, modelled land-use CO2 flux estimates and country-report-based estimates agree reasonably well in many countries once their differing definitions are accounted for, although differences remain in some other countries. A separate analysis of CO2 emissions and removals from land use using bookkeeping models also shows that historical peaks in net fluxes stem from emission peaks in most countries, whereas the long-term trends are more connected to removal dynamics. The ratio of the net flux to the sum of CO2 emissions and removals from land use (the net-to-gross flux ratio) underlines the spatio-temporal heterogeneity in the drivers of net land-use CO2 flux trends. In many tropical regions, net-to-gross flux ratios of about 50 % are due to much larger emissions than removals; in many temperate countries, ratios close to zero show that emissions and removals largely offset each other. Considering only the net flux thus potentially masks large emissions and removals and the different timescales upon which they act, particularly if averaged over countries or larger regions, highlighting the need for future studies to focus more on the gross fluxes. Data from this study are openly available via the Zenodo portal at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8144174 (Obermeier et al., 2023).

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Policy guidance and pitfalls aligning IPCC scenarios to national land emissions inventories

Cited by 3 publications

References 18 publications

Quantifying global carbon dioxide removal deployment

Quantifying global carbon dioxide removal deployment

The carbon dioxide removal gap

Country-level estimates of gross and net carbon fluxes from land use, land-use change and forestry

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