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Achieving Paris climate goals calls for increasing ambition of the Kigali Amendment

Abstract

Hydrofluorocarbon emissions have increased rapidly and are managed by the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol. Yet the current ambition is not consistent with the 1.5 °C Paris Agreement goal. Here, we draw on the Montreal Protocol start-and-strengthen approach to show that accelerated phase-down under the Kigali Amendment could result in additional reductions of 72% in 2050, increasing chances of staying below 1.5 °C throughout this century.

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Fig. 1: HFC phase-down schedule of the Article 5 and non-Article 5 parties to the MP in KA and alternative scenarios.
Fig. 2: HFC emissions.

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Data availability

Global HFC emissions data used in the baseline and alternative scenarios by MP party groups are available at: https://github.com/ppurohit76/Accelerating-HFC-phase-down-under-the-Kigali-Amendment. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

All authors contributed to parts of the research and analysis. P.P., N.B.-P. and Z.K. conceived of and coordinated the writing of the paper. P.P. and L.H.-I. performed the analysis and P.P. developed the initial draft of the paper. All authors contributed to the interpretation and analysis of the results as well as writing the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pallav Purohit.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Climate Change thanks Won Young Park, Yangyang Xu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Major milestones in the history of stratospheric ozone depletion.

This timeline highlights milestones related to the history of ozone depletion. Events represent the occurrence of important scientific findings, the completion of international scientific assessments, and milestones of the Montreal Protocol. Figure reproduced from ref. 6 [public domain].

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1 and 2.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 2

HFC emissions in baseline and alternative scenarios.

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Purohit, P., Borgford-Parnell, N., Klimont, Z. et al. Achieving Paris climate goals calls for increasing ambition of the Kigali Amendment. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 339–342 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01310-y

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