The world s forgotten greenhouse gas
By Ula Chrobak4th June 2021
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In the world s effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the source of our food is coming into the spotlight. There s good reason for that: Agriculture accounts for 16 to 27% of human-caused climate-warming emissions. But much of these emissions are not from carbon dioxide, that familiar climate change villain. They re from another gas altogether: nitrous oxide (N2O).
Also known as laughing gas, N2O does not get nearly the attention it deserves, says David Kanter, a nutrient pollution researcher at New York University and vice-chair of the International Nitrogen Initiative, an organisation focused on nitrogen pollution research and policy making. It s a forgotten greenhouse gas, he says.
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What drives the feasibility of climate scenarios commonly reviewed by organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? And can they actually be achieved in practice? A new systematic framework can help understand what to improve in the next generation of scenarios and explore how to make ambitious emission reductions possible by strengthening enabling conditions.
While the IPCC is in the midst of the drafting cycle of the Sixth Assessment Report, whose publication will start in the second half of 2021, there is an ongoing debate on how to assess the feasibility of ambitious climate mitigation scenarios developed through integrated assessment models and to what extent they are actually achievable in the real world. In their new study published in Environmental Research Letters, researchers from IIASA and the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE) developed a systematic framework that allows identifying the type, timing,
Environmental News Network - Mitigating Emissions in the Livestock Production Sector enn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from enn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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IMAGE: Illustrative example of the interpretation of the NLPs using Japan as a case study view more
Credit: Fujimori et al.
With the COP Climate conference in Glasgow only a few months away, the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and the importance of taking action at the national level to reach global climate goals is returning to the spotlight. IIASA researchers and colleagues have proposed a novel systematic and independent scenario framework that could help policymakers assess and compare climate policies and long-term strategies across countries to support coordinated global climate action.
The Paris Agreement defines a long-term temperature goal for international climate policy: holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C . Its achievement critically depends on actions and policymaking at the regional, national, and subnational level
Of the over 400 climate scenarios assessed in the 1.5°C report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), only around 50 scenarios avoid significantly overshooting 1.5°C. Of those only around 20 make realistic assumptions on mitigation options, for instance the rate and scale of carbon removal from the atmosphere or extent of tree planting, a new study shows. All 20 scenarios need to pull at least one mitigation lever at challenging rather than reasonable levels.