Increased ambition is needed after Glasgow

At COP26 in Glasgow, major emitters significantly ratcheted up their climate commitments. Such increased ambition will substantially contribute to getting closer to the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement but more ambition is required, and mitigation might face different challenges in different regions.

The latest assessment report of the IPCC highlights that current climate mitigation policies are not sufficient to reach the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement3. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) have been essential to assess the impact of different climate mitigation commitments and NDCs4,5,6,7,8,9. An engaging discussion has emerged around the feasibility of IAM-based climate mitigation scenarios, especially those that reach the more ambitious 1.5 °C target. On the one hand, there is a growing effort to improve the assumptions underlying scenarios by employing empirical evidence and insights from the literature10,11. On the other, the feasibility of scenarios can be assessed ex post by looking at challenges and enablers of specific mitigation options, such as the scale-up of solar and wind or the phase-out of coal10,12. Iterative and multidimensional approaches that allow comparison of climate mitigation commitments with different scenario narratives and insights from feasibility studies seem to be promising avenues to identify potential climate mitigation bottlenecks13.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment, Milan, Italy

    Silvia Pianta

  2. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

    Elina Brutschin

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  1. Silvia Pianta
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Silvia Pianta or Elina Brutschin.

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Pianta, S., Brutschin, E. Increased ambition is needed after Glasgow.
Nat. Clim. Chang. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01676-7

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  • Published: 18 May 2023

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01676-7

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