A future perspective of historical contributions to climate change

Ragnhild B. Skeie (), Glen Peters, Jan Fuglestvedt and Robbie Andrew
Additional contact information
Ragnhild B. Skeie: CICERO Center for International Climate Research
Jan Fuglestvedt: CICERO Center for International Climate Research
Robbie Andrew: CICERO Center for International Climate Research

Climatic Change, 2021, vol. 164, issue 1, No 24, 13 pages

Abstract: Abstract Countries’ historical contributions to climate change have been on the agenda for more than two decades and will most likely continue to be an element in future international discussions and negotiations on climate. Previous studies have quantified the historical contributions to climate change across a range of choices and assumptions. In contrast, we quantify how historical contributions to changes in global mean surface temperature (GMST) may change in the future for a broad set of choices using the quantification of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). We calculate the contributions for five coarse geographical regions used in the SSPs. Historical emissions of long-lived gases remain important for future contributions to warming, due to their accumulation and the inertia of climate system, and historical emissions are even more important for strong mitigation scenarios. When only accounting for future emissions, from 2015 to 2100, there is surprisingly little variation in the regional contributions to GMST change between the different SSPs and different mitigation targets. The largest variability in the regional future contributions is found across the different integrated assessment models (IAMs). This suggests the characteristics of the IAMs are more important for calculated future historical contributions than variations across SSP or forcing target.

Keywords: Paris Agreement; Historical contribution; Brazilian proposal; Shared socioeconomic pathways; Equity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-021-02982-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:164:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s10584-021-02982-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-021-02982-9

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().