National contributions to climate change due to historical emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide since 1850.

Anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have made significant contributions to global warming since the pre-industrial period and are therefore targeted in international climate policy. There is substantial interest in tracking and apportioning national contributions to climate change and informing equitable commitments to decarbonisation. Here, we introduce a new dataset of national contributions to global warming caused by historical emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide during the years 1851-2021, which are consistent with the latest findings of the IPCC. We calculate the global mean surface temperature response to historical emissions of the three gases, including recent refinements which account for the short atmospheric lifetime of CH4. We report national contributions to global warming resulting from emissions of each gas, including a disaggregation to fossil and land use sectors. This dataset will be updated annually as national emissions datasets are updated.

Realization of Paris Agreement pledges may limit warming just below 2 °C.

Over the last five years prior to the Glasgow Climate Pact1, 154 Parties have submitted new or updated 2030 mitigation goals in their nationally determined contributions and 76 have put forward longer-term pledges. Quantifications of the pledges before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) suggested a less than 50 per cent chance of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius2-5. Here we show that warming can be kept just below 2 degrees Celsius if all conditional and unconditional pledges are implemented in full and on time. Peak warming could be limited to 1.9-2.0 degrees Celsius (5%-95% range 1.4-2.8 °C) in the full implementation case-building on a probabilistic characterization of Earth system uncertainties in line with the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report6 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We retrospectively project twenty-first-century warming to show how the aggregate level of ambition changed from 2015 to 2021. Our results rely on the extrapolation of time-limited targets beyond 2030 or 2050, characteristics of the IPCC 1.5 °C Special Report (SR1.5) scenario database7 and the full implementation of pledges. More pessimistic assumptions on these factors would lead to higher temperature projections. A second, independent emissions modelling framework projected peak warming of 1.8 degrees Celsius, supporting the finding that realized pledges could limit warming to just below 2 degrees Celsius. Limiting warming not only to 'just below' but to 'well below' 2 degrees Celsius or 1.5 degrees Celsius urgently requires policies and actions to bring about steep emission reductions this decade, aligned with mid-century global net-zero CO2 emissions.

Attributing long-term sea-level rise to Paris Agreement emission pledges.

The main contributors to sea-level rise (oceans, glaciers, and ice sheets) respond to climate change on timescales ranging from decades to millennia. A focus on the 21st century thus fails to provide a complete picture of the consequences of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions on future sea-level rise and its long-term impacts. Here we identify the committed global mean sea-level rise until 2300 from historical emissions since 1750 and the currently pledged National Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement until 2030. Our results indicate that greenhouse gas emissions over this 280-y period result in about 1 m of committed global mean sea-level rise by 2300, with the NDC emissions from 2016 to 2030 corresponding to around 20 cm or 1/5 of that commitment. We also find that 26 cm (12 cm) of the projected sea-level-rise commitment in 2300 can be attributed to emissions from the top 5 emitting countries (China, United States of America, European Union, India, and Russia) over the 1991-2030 (2016-2030) period. Our findings demonstrate that global and individual country emissions over the first decades of the 21st century alone will cause substantial long-term sea-level rise.