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Opportunities and challenges in using remaining carbon budgets to guide climate policy

Nature Geoscience volume 13, pages 769–779 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

The remaining carbon budget represents the total amount of CO2 that can still be emitted in the future while limiting global warming to a given temperature target. Remaining carbon budget estimates range widely, however, and this uncertainty can be used to either trivialize the most ambitious mitigation targets by characterizing them as impossible, or to argue that there is ample time to allow for a gradual transition to a low-carbon economy. Neither of these extremes is consistent with our best understanding of the policy implications of remaining carbon budgets. Understanding the scientific and socio-economic uncertainties affecting the size of the remaining carbon budgets, as well as the methodological choices and assumptions that underlie their calculation, is essential before applying them as a policy tool. Here we provide recommendations on how to calculate remaining carbon budgets in a traceable and transparent way, and discuss their uncertainties and implications for both international and national climate policies.

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Fig. 1: Relationship between the TCRE, the effective TCRE, and the total and remaining carbon budgets.
Fig. 2: Illustrative example of distributing the remaining carbon budget over time into five-year discrete time intervals.

Data availability

SR1.5 scenarios have been made available through refs. 87,88 at https://data.ene.iiasa.ac.at/iamc-1.5c-explorer/.

Code availability

The MAGICC7 model emulator is available from Z.R.J.N. upon request. Codes for producing the figures are available from H.D.M. or K.B.T. upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the opportunity to have discussed these and other issues at the International Workshop on the Remaining Carbon Budget, organized with the support of the Global Carbon Project, the CRESCENDO project, Stanford University, the University of Melbourne, and Simon Fraser University. H.D.M. has been supported by funding from the Concordia University Research Chair programme and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2017-04159). K.B.T., J.R., P.M.F., R.K. and R.S. were supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 820829 (CONSTRAIN project). J.G.C. was supported by the Australian National Environmental Science Program – Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub. P.F. and T.L.F. were supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 821003 (4C project). T.L.F. was also supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under grant PP00P2_170687. A.H.M. and K.Z. are supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant Program. C.D.J. was supported by the Joint UK BEIS/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101) and by H2020 EU project CRESCENDO under grant agreement No. 641816. R.B.J. and J.G.C. acknowledge support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF5439). C.K. is supported by the US DOE, BER, RGMA program through the ECRP and RUBISCO projects.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada

    H. Damon Matthews

  2. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Katarzyna B. Tokarska & Reto Knutti

  3. Australian–German Climate and Energy College, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Zebedee R. J. Nicholls & Malte Meinshausen

  4. School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Zebedee R. J. Nicholls

  5. Grantham Institute – Climate Change and Environment, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Joeri Rogelj

  6. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria

    Joeri Rogelj

  7. Global Carbon Project, CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Josep G. Canadell

  8. College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Pierre Friedlingstein

  9. Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, Département de géosciences, École Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Sorbonne Université, École Polytechnique, CNRS, Paris, France

    Pierre Friedlingstein

  10. Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Thomas L. Frölicher

  11. Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Thomas L. Frölicher

  12. Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Piers M. Forster

  13. Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Nathan P. Gillett

  14. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

    Tatiana Ilyina

  15. Department of Earth System Science, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Robert B. Jackson

  16. Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Robert B. Jackson

  17. Met Office Hadley Centre, Exeter, UK

    Chris D. Jones

  18. Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Charles Koven

  19. St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Andrew H. MacDougall

  20. GEOMAR, Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, Kiel, Germany

    Nadine Mengis

  21. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Nadine Mengis & Kirsten Zickfeld

  22. CNRM, Université de Toulouse, Météo-France, CNRS, Toulouse, France

    Roland Séférian

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  1. H. Damon Matthews
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  2. Katarzyna B. Tokarska
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H.D.M. initiated the study and wrote the manuscript with input from K.B.T., Z.R.J.N., J.R., M.M., N.M., J.G.C., T.L.F. and suggestions from other authors. H.D.M., K.B.T. and Z.R.J.N. made the figures. All authors participated in discussions at the International Workshop on the Remaining Carbon budget which initiated this work, as well as in manuscript editing and revisions.

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Correspondence to H. Damon Matthews.

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Peer review information Primary handling editors: Tamara Goldin; Heike Langenberg; Xujia Jiang

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Matthews, H.D., Tokarska, K.B., Nicholls, Z.R.J. et al. Opportunities and challenges in using remaining carbon budgets to guide climate policy. Nat. Geosci. 13, 769–779 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-020-00663-3

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