Global emissions scenarios play a critical role in the assessment of strategies to mitigate climate change. However current scenarios are being criticized for featuring strategies that result in substantial overshooting of the global temperature goal, requiring in turn a long-term repair phase to bring temperatures down again through net-negative emissions.
The study at heand explores a new set of net-zero CO2 emissions scenarios that use upfront investments in the near term and so limit temperature overshoot, while bringing long-term economic gains. The study also identifies alternative configurations of net-zero CO2 emissions systems and the roles of different sectors and regions for balancing sources and sinks. Even without net-negative emissions, CO2 removal is important for accelerating near-term reductions and for providing an anthropogenic sink that can offset the residual emissions in sectors that are hard to abate.
Read the full study here.