Joeri Rogelj

Joeri Rogelj
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis | IIASA · Energy (ENE)

MSc, PhD

About

251
Publications
178,298
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
37,913
Citations

Publications

Publications (251)
Article
The adoption of the 1.5°C long-term warming limit in the Paris Agreement made 1.5°C a "hot topic" in the scientific community, with researchers eager to address this issue. Long-term warming limits have a decade-long history in international policy. To effectively inform the climate policy debate, geoscience research hence needs a core understandin...
Article
Full-text available
The UN Paris Agreement puts in place a legally binding mechanism to increase mitigation action over time. Countries put forward pledges called nationally determined contributions (NDC) whose impact is assessed in global stocktaking exercises. Subsequently, actions can then be strengthened in light of the Paris climate objective: limiting global mea...
Article
Full-text available
FULL PAPER OPEN ACCESS: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/10/29/1415631111.full.pdf+html Anthropogenic global warming is driven by emissions of a wide variety of radiative forcers ranging from very short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs), like black carbon, to very long-lived, like CO2. These species are often released from common sources and are...
Article
This paper presents a systematic scenario analysis of how different levels of short-term 2020 emissions would impact the technological and economic feasibility of achieving the 2 degrees C target in the long term. We find that although a relatively wide range of emissions in 2020-from 41 to 55 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO(2)e yr...
Article
The Paris climate agreement aims at holding global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and to “pursue efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees Celsius. To accomplish this, countries have submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) outlining their post-2020 climate action. Here we assess the effect of current INDCs on reducing aggr...
Preprint
Full-text available
We evaluate five highly-publicized polar 'geoengineering' proposals and point to significant issues and risks relating to technological availability, logistical feasibility, cost, predictable adverse consequences, environmental damage, scalability (in time and space), governance, and ethics. According to our assessment, no current geoengineering id...
Article
Full-text available
Global emission reduction efforts continue to be insufficient to meet the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement¹. This makes the systematic exploration of so-called overshoot pathways that temporarily exceed a targeted global warming limit before drawing temperatures back down to safer levels a priority for science and policy2–5. Here we show tha...
Book
UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2024: No more hot air … please! is the 15th edition in a series that brings together many of the world’s top climate scientists to look at future trends in greenhouse gas emissions and provide potential solutions to the challenge of global warming. As climate impacts intensify globally, the report finds that nations must...
Preprint
Full-text available
Fairness considerations have been central to the international climate change mitigation discourse, generating numerous theoretical and philosophical debates. In this article, we address the pressing need for practical guidance on navigating this landscape in assessing relative mitigation efforts. The Paris Agreement mandates that updates to Nation...
Article
Full-text available
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) employs emission scenarios to explore a range of future climate outcomes but refrains from assigning probabilities to individual scenarios. However, IPCC authors have their own views on the likelihood of different climate outcomes, which are valuable to understand because authors possess both exp...
Article
Full-text available
Despite faster-than-expected progress in clean energy technology deployment, global annual CO2 emissions have increased from 2020 to 2023. The feasibility of limiting warming to 1.5 °C is therefore questioned. Here we present a model intercomparison study that accounts for emissions trends until 2023 and compares cost-effective scenarios to alterna...
Article
Full-text available
Under current emission trajectories, temporarily overshooting the Paris global warming limit of 1.5 °C is a distinct possibility. Permanently exceeding this limit would substantially increase the probability of triggering climate tipping elements. Here, we investigate the tipping risks associated with several policy-relevant future emission scenari...
Article
Full-text available
The era of anthropogenic climate change can be described by defined climate milestones. These milestones mark changes in the historic trajectory of change, and include peak greenhouse gas emissions, peak greenhouse gas concentration, deceleration of warming, net-zero emissions, and a transition to global cooling. However, given internal variability...
Article
Full-text available
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information on key indicators of the state of the clim...
Article
Full-text available
In every Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment cycle, a multitude of scenarios are assessed, with different scope and emphasis throughout the various Working Group reports and special reports, as well as their respective chapters. Within the reports, the ambition is to integrate knowledge on possible climate futures across the...
Preprint
Full-text available
Current emissions trends are likely to deplete a 1.5°C consistent carbon budget soon after the year 2030, resulting in a period of overshoot. To navigate responsibilities for and during this period we contrast ‘fair’ allocations of a remaining carbon budget with projected carbon emissions trends until net-zero. We term this measure the ‘net-zero ca...
Preprint
Full-text available
Procedural justice is essential in climate negotiation spaces to ensure inclusivity and transparency in a global challenge. However, annual Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are increasing in size and complexity, which makes discourse and organisational relationships more...
Preprint
Full-text available
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Evidence-based decision-making needs to be informed by up-to-date and timely information on key indicators of the state of the clim...
Article
Targets can distort competition in favor of incumbent firms Widely recognized as key partners for achieving international climate goals (1, 2), businesses like to indicate that their targets and activities are ?Paris-aligned.? In response, research and initiatives have emerged to guide and assess whether companies? targets represent an adequate mit...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social and environmental agendas are closely linked and dominate international policy discussions. To support these discussions, we explore how gaps in decent living standards (DLS) could be closed while transitioning to a more desirable climate-friendly and sustainable future. We use a new model called DESIRE (Decent living standards and the Envir...
Article
Full-text available
Carbon dioxide removal is key to climate change mitigation, yet implications of its deployment remain unclear. Recent exponential growth in literature is rapidly filling this gap but makes the synthesis of the evidence on carbon dioxide removal side effects increasingly challenging. Here we address this issue by mapping this literature and proposin...
Article
Full-text available
IPCC reports, to date, have not featured ambitious mitigation scenarios with degrowth in high-income regions. Here, using MESSAGEix-Australia, we create 51 emissions scenarios for Australia with near-term GDP growth going from +3%/year to rapid reductions (−5%/year) to explore how a traditional integrated assessment model (IAM) represents degrowth...
Preprint
Full-text available
Equity is a cornerstone of global climate policy, yet no international agreement has managed to agree on how to allocate mitigation efforts across countries. While a rich literature informs these deliberations, there remains a gap in approaches that appropriately consider non-CO 2 emissions and their warming contributions. In this study, we define...
Preprint
Full-text available
The AR6 Scenario Database is a vital repository of climate change mitigation pathways used in the latest IPCC assessment cycle. In its current version, several scenarios in the database lack information about the level of gross carbon removal on land, as net and gross removals on land are not always separated and consistently reported across models...
Article
Full-text available
Carbon budgets are quantifications of the total amount of carbon dioxide that can ever be emitted while keeping global warming below specific temperature limits. However, estimates of these budgets for limiting warming to 1.5 °C and well-below 2 °C include assumptions about how much warming can be expected from non-CO2 emissions. Here, we uncover t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is key to climate change mitigation, yet implications of its deployment remain unclear. Recent exponential growth in literature is rapidly filling this gap but makes the synthesis of the evidence on CDR side effects increasingly challenging. We address this issue by mapping this literature and proposing a taxonomy to sy...
Article
Commitments to net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions targets now cover 88% of countries’ emissions. Underlying the accounting behind net-zero frameworks is the assumption that emissions can be balanced with removals such that their net climate effect is zero. However, when considering the full climate impacts of CO2 emissi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Previous phases of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) have primarily focused on simulations driven by atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs), both for idealized model experiments, and for climate projections of different emissions scenarios. We argue that although this approach was pragmatic to allow parallel developmen...
Technical Report
Full-text available
The Emissions Gap Report is UNEP's spotlight report launched annually in advance of the annual Climate negotiations. The EGR tracks the gap between where global emissions are heading with current country commitments and where they ought to be to limit warming to 1.5°C. Each edition explores ways to bridge the emissions gap.
Article
Climate targets that depend heavily on CO 2 removal may contravene international law
Article
Full-text available
How do we halt global warming? Reaching net zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is understood to be a key milestone on the path to a safer planet. But how confident are we that when we stop carbon emissions, we also stop global warming? The Zero Emissions Commitment (ZEC) quantifies how much warming or cooling we can expect following a complete ces...
Article
Full-text available
How do we stop global warming? We know that excess carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) in the atmosphere causes global warming, but when we stop emitting CO 2 –a goal known as net zero—will warming stop at the same time? Our best understanding is that no more CO 2 emissions means no more warming, but we are not completely sure about this. The extra change in te...
Article
Full-text available
The transition towards a low-carbon power system presents challenges and opportunities for the workforce with important implications for just transitions. Studies of these distributional labour impacts could benefit from tighter linkages between energy and employment modelling. Here, we couple a power-sector optimization model, an employment impact...
Article
Full-text available
The remaining carbon budget (RCB), the net amount of CO2 humans can still emit without exceeding a chosen global warming limit, is often used to evaluate political action against the goals of the Paris Agreement. RCB estimates for 1.5 °C are small, and minor changes in their calculation can therefore result in large relative adjustments. Here we ev...
Preprint
Full-text available
In every IPCC Assessment cycle, a multitude of scenarios are assessed, with different scope and emphasis throughout the various Working Group and Special Reports and their respective chapters. Within the reports, the ambition is to integrate knowledge on possible climate futures across the Working Groups and scientific research domains based on a s...
Preprint
Full-text available
Estimates of the remaining carbon budget (RCB) for limiting warming to 1.5°C and well-below 2°C include assumptions about how much warming can be expected from non-CO2 emissions. Here, we uncover the non-CO2 assumptions that underlie the RCB estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We show how pursuing inadequate CH4 emission red...
Preprint
Full-text available
Escalating impacts of climate change underscore the risk of crossing thresholds of socio-ecological systems and adaptation limits. However, limitations in the provision of actionable climate information may hinder an adequate response. Here we suggest a reversal of the traditional impact chain methodology as an end-user focused approach to link loc...
Preprint
Full-text available
Under current emission trajectories, at least temporarily overshooting the Paris global warming limit of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels is a distinct possibility. Permanently exceeding this limit would substantially increase the risks of triggering several climate tipping elements with associated high-end impacts on human societies and the Eart...
Article
Full-text available
To limit global warming to well below 2°C, immediate emissions reductions must be coupled with active removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. “Natural Climate Solutions” (NCS) achieve atmospheric CO 2 reduction through the conservation, restoration, or altered management of natural ecosystems, with enormous potential to deliver “win-win-wi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Looking at policies instead of promises shows that global climate targets may be missed by a large margin
Article
Full-text available
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), including the first global stocktake under the Paris Agreement that will conclude at COP28 in December 2023. Evidence-based decisio...
Article
Looking at policies instead of promises shows that global climate targets may be missed by a large margin.
Article
Full-text available
The COP26 Glasgow process resulted in many countries strengthening their 2030 emissions reduction targets and announcing net-zero pledges for 2050–2070 but it is not clear how this would impact future warming. Here, we use four diverse integrated assessment models (IAMs) to assess CO2 emission trajectories in the near- and long-term on the basis of...
Preprint
Full-text available
The Paris Agreement aims to reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the second half of the 21st century, and the Oil & Gas sector plays a key role in achieving this transition. Understanding progress in emission reductions in the private sector relies on the disclosure of corporate climate-related data, and the Carbon Disclosure Project (C...
Article
Full-text available
One of the successes of COP26 (the 26th Conference of the Parties) was the prominence of climate science and its implications. Science was written into the https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cop26_auv_2f_cover_decision.pdf , recognizing ‘the importance of the best available science for effective climate action and policy making’. This...
Preprint
Full-text available
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments are the trusted source of scientific evidence for climate negotiations taking place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), including the first global stocktake under the Paris Agreement that will conclude at COP28 in December 2023. Evidence-based decisio...
Article
Full-text available
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) features prominently in the 1.5 °C compatible and high overshoot pathways in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, WGIII). However, the amount of CDR varies considerably among scenarios. We analyze the range in CDR volumes in AR6 WGIII pathways by exploring relationships between variables as potential driving forces,...
Preprint
Contributions from fossil fuel companies to a Loss and Damage fund have been explicitly called for. Here we estimate societal damages caused by emissions attributable to fossil fuel companies to be of the order of several trillion USD since 1985 and to exceed the cumulative company profits generated over the same period. Even record profits of 2022...
Technical Report
Full-text available
A method to analyze the global warming implications of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and other long-term emissions reduction targets is described. In addition, a method to understand the potential Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) consequences of the implied emissions pathways is presented.
Article
Full-text available
Since the adoption of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the publication of the 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, net zero targets have become a central feature in climate policy. This Perspective looks back at the scientific foundations of this recent policy development, the current state of...
Article
Full-text available
While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) physical science reports usually assess a handful of future scenarios, the Working Group III contribution on climate mitigation to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6 WGIII) assesses hundreds to thousands of future emissions scenarios. A key task in WGIII is to assess the global mean te...
Preprint
Full-text available
The discovery of a near-proportionality between cumulative anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and global warming since pre-industrial times is arguably the most important policy-relevant simplification of climate change science in the last 25 years. Unfortunately, the latest CMIP6 Earth System Models continue to diagnose a wide range of carbon...
Article
Considering cryosphere and warming uncertainties together implies drastically increased risk of threshold crossing in the cryosphere, even under lower-emission pathways, and underscores the need to halve emissions by 2030 in line with the 1.5 °C limit of the Paris Agreement.
Preprint
Full-text available
The COP26 Glasgow process resulted in many countries strengthening their 2030 emissions reduction targets and announcing net-zero pledges for 2050–2070. We use four diverse integrated assessment models (IAMs) to assess CO 2 emission trajectories in the near- and long-term based on national policies and pledges, combined with a non-CO 2 infilling mo...
Article
Full-text available
Plain Language Summary The IPCC's latest physical science report, the Working Group 1 Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), was released in August 2021. That report includes an update to the tools used to project the climate outcome of emission scenarios. Here we apply these newly calibrated tools, called earth system model emulators,...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine have impacted the global economy, including the energy sector. The pandemic caused drastic fluctuations in energy demand, oil price shocks, disruptions in energy supply chains, and hampered energy investments, while the war left the world with energy price hikes and energy security challenges. The l...
Preprint
Full-text available
The remaining carbon budget (RCB), the net amount of carbon dioxide humans can still emit without exceeding a chosen global warming limit, is often used to evaluate political action against the goals of the Paris Agreement. RCB estimates for 1.5C are small, and minor changes in their calculation can therefore result in large relative shifts. Here w...
Preprint
Full-text available
While the IPCC’s physical science report usually assesses a handful of future scenarios, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Working Group III report (AR6 WGIII) on climate mitigation assesses hundreds to thousands of future emissions scenarios. A key task is to assess the global-mean temperature outcomes of these scenarios in a consistent manner, given the...