A Fair Plan to Safeguard Earth’s Climate

Abstract

A maximum global-mean warming of 2°C above preindustrial temperatures has been adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. Attempts to find agreements on emissions reductions have proved highly intractable because industrialized countries are responsible for most of the historical emissions, while developing countries will produce most of the future emissions. Here we present a Fair Plan for reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions. Under the Plan, all countries begin mitigation in 2015 and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to zero in 2065. Developing countries are required to follow a mitigation trajectory that is less aggressive in the early years of the Plan than the mitigation trajectory for developed countries. The trajectories are chosen such that the cumulative emissions of the Kyoto Protocol’s Annex B (developed) and non-Annex B (developing) countries are equal. Under this Fair Plan the global-mean warming above preindustrial temperatures is held below 2°C.