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Socio-Political Feedback on the Path to Net Zero

Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 must soon approach net-zero to stabilize the global mean temperature. Although several international agreements have advocated for coordinated climate actions, their implementation has remained below expectations. One of the main challenges of international cooperation is the different degrees of socio-political acceptance of decarbonization. Here we interrogate a minimalistic model of the coupled natural-human system representing the impact of such socio-political acceptance on clean energy investments and the path to net-zero emissions. We show that incentives and carbon pricing are essential tools to achieve net-zero before critical CO2 concentrations are reached, and deep international coordination is necessary for a rapid and effective transition. Although a perfect coordination scenario remains unlikely, as investments in clean energy are ultimately limited by myopic economic strategies and a policy system that promotes free-riding, more realistic decentralized cooperation with partial efforts from each actor could still lead to significant emissions cuts.