Abstract
Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have requested guidance on common greenhouse gas metrics in accounting for Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to emission reductions1. Metric choice can affect the relative emphasis placed on reductions of ‘cumulative climate pollutants’ such as carbon dioxide versus ‘short-lived climate pollutants’ (SLCPs), including methane and black carbon2,3,4,5,6. Here we show that the widely used 100-year global warming potential (GWP100) effectively measures the relative impact of both cumulative pollutants and SLCPs on realized warming 20–40 years after the time of emission. If the overall goal of climate policy is to limit peak warming, GWP100 therefore overstates the importance of current SLCP emissions unless stringent and immediate reductions of all climate pollutants result in temperatures nearing their peak soon after mid-century7,8,9,10, which may be necessary to limit warming to “well below 2 °C” (ref. 1). The GWP100 can be used to approximately equate a one-off pulse emission of a cumulative pollutant and an indefinitely sustained change in the rate of emission of an SLCP11,12,13. The climate implications of traditional CO2-equivalent targets are ambiguous unless contributions from cumulative pollutants and SLCPs are specified separately.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$209.00 per year
only $17.42 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adoption of the Paris Agreement FCCC/CP/2015/L.9/Rev.1 (UNFCCC, 2015).
Shine, K., Fuglestvedt, J., Hailemariam, K. & Stuber, N. Alternatives to the global warming potential for comparing climate impacts of emissions of greenhouse gases. Climatic Change 68, 281–302 (2005).
Fuglestvedt, J. S. et al. Assessment of transport impacts on climate and ozone: metrics. Atmos. Environ. 44, 4648–4677 (2010).
Shindell, D. et al. Simultaneously mitigating near-term climate change and improving human health and food security. Science 335, 183–189 (2012).
Victor, D. G., Kennel, C. F. & Ramanathan, V. The climate threat we can beat. Foreign Aff. 91, 112–114 (2012).
Rogelj, J. et al. Disentangling the effects of CO2 and short-lived climate forcer mitigation. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 16325–16330 (2014).
Bowerman, N. H. A. et al. The role of short-lived climate pollutants in meeting temperature goals. Nature Clim. Change 3, 1021–1024 (2013).
Pierrehumbert, R. T. Short-lived climate pollution. Annu. Rev. Earth Planet. Sci. 42, 341–379 (2014).
Allen, M. R. et al. Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne. Nature 458, 1163–1166 (2009).
Matthews, H. D. & Caldeira, K. Stabilizing climate requires near-zero emissions. Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, GL032388 (2008).
Smith, S. M. et al. Equivalence of greenhouse-gas emissions for peak temperature limits. Nature Clim. Change 2, 535–538 (2012).
Lauder, A. R. et al. Offsetting methane emissions—an alternative to emission equivalence metrics. Int. J. Greenh. Gas Contr. 12, 419–429 (2013).
Alvarez, R. A. et al. Greater focus needed on methane leakage from natural gas infrastructure. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 6435–6440 (2012).
Ecuador’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (Gobierno Nacional de la Republica del Ecuador, 2015); http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/INDC
Bond, T. C. et al. Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system: a scientific assessment. J. Geophys. Res. 118, 5380–5552 (2013).
Myhre, G. et al. in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) Ch. 8 (IPCC, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).
Brazil’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (Federative Republic of Brazil, 2015); http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/INDC
Shine, K. P. et al. Comparing the climatic effects of emissions of short- and long-lived climate agents. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 365, 1903–1914 (2007).
Olivié, D. J. L. & Peters, G. P. Variation in emission metrics due to variation in CO2 and temperature impulse response functions. Earth Syst. Dyn. 4, 267–286 (2013).
Reisinger, A. et al. Future changes in global warming potentials under representative concentration pathways. Environ. Res. Lett. 6, 024020 (2011).
Daniel, J. S. et al. Limitations of single-basket trading: lessons from the Montreal Protocol for Climate Policy. Climatic Change 111, 241–248 (2012).
Johansson, D. Economics- and physical-based metrics for comparing greenhouse gases. Climatic Change 110, 123–141 (2012).
Peters, G., Aamaas, B., Berntsen, T. & Fuglestvedt, J. The integrated global temperature change potential (iGTP) and relationships between emission metrics. Environ. Res. Lett. 6, 044021 (2011).
Millar, R. J. et al. Model structure in observational constraints on the transient climate response. Climatic Change 131, 199–211 (2015).
Gillett, N. P. & Matthews, H. D. Accounting for carbon cycle feedbacks in a comparison of the global warming effects of different greenhouse gases. Environ. Res. Lett. 5, 034011 (2010).
Schmale, J. et al. Air pollution: clean up our skies. Nature 515, 335–337 (2014).
Deser, C. et al. Uncertainty in climate change projections: the role of internal variability. Clim. Dynam. 38, 527–546 (2010).
Allen, M. R. & Stocker, T. F. Impact of delay in reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Nature Clim. Change 4, 23–26 (2013).
Huntingford, C. et al. The implications of carbon dioxide and methane exchange for the heavy mitigation RCP2.6 scenario under two metrics. Environ. Sci. Policy 51, 77–87 (2015).
New Zealand’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (New Zealand Government, 2015); http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/INDC
Acknowledgements
M.R.A. was supported by the Oxford Martin Programme on Resource Stewardship. M.R.A. and K.P.S. received support from the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change under contract no. TRN/307/11/2011; J.S.F. from the Norwegian Research Council, project no. 235548; R.T.P. from the Kung Carl XVI Gustaf 50-års fond; P.M.F. from the UK Natural Environment Research Council grant no. NE/N006038/1. The authors would like to thank numerous colleagues, particularly among IPCC authors, for discussions of metrics over recent years, and J. Cook for encouraging this work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
M.R.A. conceived and led the study; all authors contributed to extensive discussions, analysis, interpretation and writing of the paper.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Allen, M., Fuglestvedt, J., Shine, K. et al. New use of global warming potentials to compare cumulative and short-lived climate pollutants. Nature Clim Change 6, 773–776 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2998
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2998
This article is cited by
-
Risk to rely on soil carbon sequestration to offset global ruminant emissions
Nature Communications (2023)
-
Future warming from global food consumption
Nature Climate Change (2023)
-
Net-zero approaches must consider Earth system impacts to achieve climate goals
Nature Climate Change (2023)
-
Context-specific assessments of carbon footprints of the rice value chain: from product labeling to potential mitigation impacts
The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment (2023)
-
Research needs for a food system transition
Climatic Change (2023)