Will Nations Meet the Paris Agreement’s Emissions and Temperature Goals?

The Paris Agreement’s first Global Stocktake (GST) is set to conclude at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) in late 2023. The GST is the means by which parties to the Paris Agreement monitor progress towards its goals, including Article 2’s goal of limiting warming to between 1.5 °C and 2 °C above preindustrial levels and Article 4’s goal of peaking greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible. However, as the UN Environment Programme stresses in the latest Emissions Gap Report, the window to achieving these goals is closing rapidly.In the vast majority of literature assessing future socioeconomic, energy, and climate systems, projections for emissions scenarios are based on current policies, nationally determined contributions, or hypothetical socioeconomic “pathways”—or are designed to target specific degrees of temperature rise. While these scenarios are informative for policymakers, they do not provide information on their relative likelihoods, which limits their value for assessing the probability of meeting Paris goals.