Analysing the emission gap between pledged emission reductions under the Cancún Agreements and the 2 °C climate target

Since the climate negotiations in Copenhagen (2009), many countries have pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. These pledges were 'anchored' in the 2010 Cancún Agreements. Since the Cancún climate negotiations, developing countries have published new information about their business-as-usual emission projections . These – upward – projections have led to higher expected emission levels from the pledges, and have increased the emission gap towards achieving the 2 degree Celsius climate goal.

This report is an update of the PBL report Evaluation of the Copenhagen Accord (Den Elzen et al., 2010). The main updates consist of taking into account the business-asusual emission projections as provided by countries themselves, and include CO2 emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), describe more uncertainties and factors that influence the emission gap, and include more countries in the pledge analysis.

In the original report, the evaluation of the pledges was performed within the FAIR modelling framework (Den Elzen et al., 2011a; 2011b), using the following businessas-usual projections from several sources: projections published by the countries themselves (e.g. national communications, national climate action plans), PBL/IIASA projections (for Annex I countries: PBL businessas-usual projections), and projections based on data from the World Energy Outlook (WEO-2010) (IEA, 2010). PBL/IIASA projections contain all Kyoto greenhouse gases (except CO2 emissions from land-use change) and have been developed for the upcoming OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050 (OECD, 2012). These projections had been made using the PBL energy model ‘TIMER’ (Van Vuuren et al., 2006; 2011) and the PBL land-use model ‘IMAGE’ (Bouwman et al., 2006). These business-as-usual emission projections were based on GDP projections calculated by the OECD ENV-Linkages model (Burniaux and Chateau, 2008), and projections from the ENV-Linkages model of the OECD (Burniaux and Chateau, 2008). These GDP projections do not include any possible effects of future climate policy. For the non-Annex I countries, projections for CO2 emissions from land-use change (e.g. from deforestation) were based on the IIASA forestry model ‘G4M’ (Kindermann et al., 2006; 2008). For the WEO–2010 projections, data on energy-related CO2 emissions were taken from the World Energy Outlook 2010 (IEA, 2010) and the greenhouse gas emissions from other sources were derived from the PBL/IIASA business-as-usual projections.