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Cumulative emissions and climate policy

Nature Geoscience volume 7, pages 692–693 (2014)Cite this article

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The emerging scientific focus on cumulative carbon emissions may make climate negotiations harder. But, it serves to clarify the scale and scope of climate mitigation needed to meet potential temperature targets.

For any given temperature target, such as limiting the warming of global mean surface temperatures to 2 °C above preindustrial levels, there is a total amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted into the atmosphere1,2,3. If this target maximum temperature change is 2 °C, the threshold of cumulative emissions lies at about one trillion tonnes of carbon (emitted since the beginning of industrialization). Scientifically, this conceptual framework of a fixed carbon budget for a given temperature target has proved compelling and influential, and in principle it is also of strong relevance to policy4,5. As a potential measure for the success of climate mitigation policies, however, the concept of cumulative emissions has received a far cooler reception by many in international climate negotiations.

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Figure 1: Traditional versus cumulative emissions framework.

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Author information

Affiliations

  1. New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute, School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, PO Box 600, New Zealand

    David J. Frame & Adrian H. Macey

  2. Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, PO Box 600, New Zealand

    Adrian H. Macey

  3. ECI, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK

    Myles R. Allen

  4. Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK

    Myles R. Allen

Authors
  1. David J. Frame
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  2. Adrian H. Macey
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  3. Myles R. Allen
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Correspondence to David J. Frame.

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Frame, D., Macey, A. & Allen, M. Cumulative emissions and climate policy. Nature Geosci 7, 692–693 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2254

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