Promising climate progress

The global climate goals of the Paris Agreement will have to be met through action at the national level. So how do existing national plans and pledges stack up? One of the leading efforts to answer this question is through the Exploring National and Global Actions to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions (ENGAGE) Project. Within ENGAGE, a collaboration of international groups is calculating how national policies would affect global emissions

Climate policy and the SDGs agenda: how does near-term action on nexus SDGs influence the achievement of long-term climate goals?

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) represent the global ambition to accelerate sustainable development. Several SDGs are directly related to climate change and policies aiming to mitigate it. This includes, among others, the set of SDGs that directly influence the climate, land, energy, and water (CLEW) nexus (SDGs 2, 6, 7, 13, 15). This study aims at understanding the synergies and trade-offs between climate policy and the SDGs agenda: how does near-term action on SDGs influence long-term climate goals? Based on a multi-model comparison, we evaluate three scenarios: (i) reference; (ii) climate mitigation; and (iii) a CLEW nexus SDGs scenario. We find clear positive effects of combining the climate and the sustainable development agendas. Notably, healthier diets, with reduced meat consumption, have strong co-benefits for climate, with positive effects across multiple SDGs: improvements in food security, reductions in air pollution and water stress, and improvements in biodiversity conservation. Such positive outcomes are prominent in the Global South, where regions typically at higher risk of food and energy insecurity and other environmental stresses (e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America) benefit from a shorter term agenda focusing not only on the climate but also on the other sustainable development dimensions. However, trade-offs are also observed (e.g. increases in the prices of food and electricity), especially in the dynamics of land and the food systems, highlighting the importance of exploring policy synergies: if individually applied, some measures can negatively impact other sustainability goals, while taking into consideration the nexus interactions can reduce trade-offs and increase co-benefits. Finally, near-term action on SDGs can help speed up the transition towards the long-term climate goals, reducing the reliance on negative emissions options. In 2100, the SDG scenario in significantly less reliant on carbon dioxide removals both from AFOLU and the energy system

ENGAGE Summary for Policymakers

As the world faces the risks of dangerous climate change, policymakers, industry and civil society leaders are counting on Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to inform and guide strategies to deliver on the objectives of the Paris Agreement (PA) and subsequent agreements. The Exploring National and Global Actions to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions (ENGAGE) project has responded to this challenge by engaging these stakeholders in co-producing a new generation of global and national decarbonization pathways

ENGAGE post-Glasgow long-term strategies

This set of scenarios integrates global pathways into a coherent set of low-carbon mid-century strategies, assessing current policies, NDCs and national mid-century strategies and their consistency with global pathways to 1.5/2°C warming levels and identifying the most effective policies in different countries and sectors