Roman-Cuesta, R., den Elzen, M., Araujo, Z., Forseli, N., Lamb, W., McGlynn, E., Melo, J., Rossi, S., Meinshausen, M., Federici, S., Gidden, M., Keramidas, K., Korouso, A., Grassi, G.
Land remains a blind spot in tracking progress under the Paris Agreement due to lack of data comparability
in Nature Communications, 20.11.2024
Peer Review , Applied Sustainability Sciences
Carbon fluxes from land use are key to the Paris Agreement. However, data comparability issues persist between countries’ inventories and targets (Nationally Determined Contributions, NDCs), which generally include direct and indirect anthropogenic net emissions, and what models provide as Paris-aligned benchmarks (direct net emissions only). As a result, the first Global Stocktake, aiming to track collective mitigation progress, did not explicitly consider country targets for land. This blind spot leaves countries uninformed of the 2030 gap between their ambitions for mitigation on land and models’ benchmarks, affecting net-zero trajectories. We provide an analysis of land-related targets under NDC 2020, splitting reduced emissions and additional sinks. Land use holds a quarter of global mitigation pledges in 2030, mostly through conditional support (-1.5ǂ1.1 GtCO2e/yr, of which − 0.6 GtCO2e/yr are additional sinks). To provide more policy-relevant information to decision makers, it is crucial that future Global Stocktakes also include appropriate comparisons of modelled scenarios and country land-use data.
