Encontros Scientia

IPCC emission scenarios confronted with historical data and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on climate change

IPCC emission scenarios confronted with historical data and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on climate change

Filipe Duarte Santos (cE3c, Ciências ULisboa; CNADS)

Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GGE) scenarios made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) cover a period of 30 years and include several generations of scenarios. These include the 1990 IPCC First Scientific Assessment, the 1992 IPCC Scenarios (IS92), and the 2000 Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES). They also include more recent emissions scenarios developed outside the IPCC i.e., the 2010 Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and the 2014 Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), but extensively used in recent IPCC reports. These emission scenarios aim to explore possible trajectories consistent with current expectations, as well as more uncertain developments that show trajectories that would meet specific goals or explore possible high impact futures. A comparison of these emission scenarios with historical emissions in the period 1990-2017 will be presented and discussed. Our results indicate that the emissions scenario sets capture fairly well global socioeconomic developments but show significant differences notably for regional projections. The likelihood of complying with the UNFCCC Paris Agreement taking into account the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic will be analysed.

Thursday, November 5, 2020, at 12h00-13h00 (Lisbon, Portugal time)

ONLINE, on our YouTube channel, here: https://youtu.be/LfuwneHBrvM.