Paper detail

Source attributions of radiative forcing by regions, sectors, and climate forcers

It is important to understand how the emissions of different regions, sectors, or climate forcers play a role on pathways toward the Paris Agreement temperature targets. There are however methodological challenges for attributing individual contributions due to complexities associated with a variety of climate forcers affecting the climate system on different spatial and temporal scales. Here, we use the latest historical and future emissions data for a comprehensive set of climate forcers as well as land-use datasets and apply the normalized marginal approach to quantify the forcing contributions of regions, sectors and forcing agents toward the 2C and 1.5C targets. We show that most of the worldwide regions and sectors need to maintain forcing levels not higher than present levels to attain the 1.5C target of the Paris Agreement, while slightly higher future forcing levels than present levels are allowed for the 2C target. Our results illustrate the importance of negative CO2 emissions, which contribute -0.75+/-0.44 Wm-2 and -0.42+/-0.27 Wm-2 to the 2C and 1.5C targets. Less negative forcings, or more positive forcings are also identified for the land-use albedo for the 2C and 1.5C scenarios compared to existing studies.