Correlation between Representative Concentration Pathways and Paris Agreement

Stavros Lazarou, Lambros Ekonomou, Athanasios Dagoumas

Abstract


Paris Agreement stands as the flagship of ongoing international climate change agreements. The Paris Agreement’s central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The agreement’s aim is generic and therefore meeting its targets is not a deterministic problem. This paper aims at correlating Paris Agreement with Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) over the end of the century, using as starting point the RCP2.6 scenario and consequently proposing and examining pathways that involve substantial decrease of emissions compared to RCP2.6, namely RCP 2.0 and RCP1.0. The results, through the elaboration of an integrated assessment tool (GCAM), provide useful insights on extended pathways for meeting Paris Agreement targets. Our findings include the requirement of major negative emissions. Industrialized and developing countries have substantial contribution, mostly based on their population rather than their economic situation.


Keywords


Representative Concentration Pathways; Paris Agreement; Climate Change; Carbon emissions

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References


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DOI (PDF): https://doi.org/10.20508/ijrer.v8i2.7580.g7380

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