Climate Budgets vs Targets: A Closer Look at Our Goals
Carbon budgets and climate targets are different strategies for setting goals to pollute less and make the world safe and healthy and fair. They are different in their approach, and the difference is important.
We’ll look at some of the pitfalls of targets, how a budget is better, how do fairly share the budget and what a good budget looks like after 35 years of failure to reduce emissions.
Spoiler alert: BC and Canada have extremely dangerous climate targets, or, put another way, we are currently planning to fail on climate change.
Thanks for reading Max’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Understanding Climate Budgets
Climate budgets define the total allowable CO2 emissions that can be released into the atmosphere to maintain a specific temperature target, such as limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. It's a scientific measure that gives us a finite, diminishing "budget" of carbon emissions.
Budgets are what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces. The budgets are organised into amounts of CO2 that cause a % chance of warming a certain amount. The budget below is global emissions, and is in billions of tonnes or Gt CO2. The world (mostly rich people) has polluted 2495 Gt CO2 and has 380 left to burn, for a 50/50 chance at keeping below 1.5C. We’re spewing out ~37 per year currently...
Climate Targets: Goals with Imprecision
Climate targets, in contrast, often outline percentage reductions in emissions by certain dates, such as a 40% reduction by 2030. While these targets provide direction, they can be imprecise. The problem lies in the fact that these targets allow for a wide range of total emissions and often lack a clear link to the remaining carbon budget.
This disconnection from the carbon budget means that even if targets are met, the cumulative emissions might still exceed the budget, leading to temperature increases beyond the desired limits.
It is also unclear what share of the remaining budget we are claiming when we set a target. Is it more than our fair share or less? Is it going to keep warming below extremely unsafe levels? What level of warming are we aiming at? How was it chosen? The lack of specificity hides these questions, and their answers.
The BC government does not make clear on its website what warming level it is aiming for. Personal correspondence with the Ministry of Environment has revealed they are committed to staying below 1.5C and modelling their efforts on the Paris Agreement. Limiting warming to well below 2C and trying for 1.5C is the goal Canada committed to with the Paris Agreement. 1.5C is much safer than 2C, and the OECD says any warmer than that is far too risky.
Fair-sharing
The Paris Agreement, Article 2(2) highlights the fact that not all jurisdictions have the same responsibility to reduce emissions.
Some regions can increase, others decrease slowly, and some have the responsibility to decrease very fast. Because of historical emissions, decades of delay, and a greater ability to invest in reductions, Canada has to move faster than most (eg. 0 by yesterday). See below for more on this, and read this article.
From Global Carbon Budget to BC's Target: A Complex Equation
So how do we translate the global carbon budget into something meaningful for BC? Here's a step-by-step guide:
1. The Global 1.5°C Budget:
Starting Point: The IPCC gives a global budget of 380 GtCO2 for a 50/50 chance of keeping below 1.5°C of warming.
Timeframe: With current global emissions at 37.5 GtCO2, this gives 10 years before the global budget for 50% chance of 1.5°C is depleted entirely.
Precautionary Note: The IPCC suggests that we ‘could’ (ie should) subtract from this budget for poorly understood feedbacks and unaccounted other types of greenhouse gases (just a little methane, for example). It also adds to this budget by assuming widespead unproven and wildly expensive carbon capture and storage. This year (2023) we are seeing stark example of feedbacks as climate-fueled wildfire adds huge amounts of co2 to the atmosphere.
2. Translating to BC's Budget:
The remaining global budget is tricky to translate into a BC budget. We have to decide how much of that budget we are ‘entitled’ to. There are several approaches, and they all make moral judgements.
By Population: The simplest approach. Divide the global budget by the world's population and multiply by BC's population (5.2 million). Result: 0.7 GtCO2 for BC. Dividing this by our annual emissions, BC should be at zero emissions by 2030.
By Emissions (Grandfathering): Here we take our historical emissions proportion and extend that to the remaining budget. And at current rates, BC should be at zero emissions by roughly December, 2023.
Fair share (reverse grandfather): This takes the approach where those who have emitted more in the past, get to emit less of the budget going forward. This also gives those nations who haven’t yet gotten electricity to every home, running water and alleviation from poverty a chance to increase their emissions for a while, to catch up to our standards of living. This option, sadly, is largely behind us already. We have already used our entire fair-share of the global carbon budget. We can make up for this by helping some countries reduce faster, and helping to force others to reduce faster.
For a sense of the range of options for splitting remaining budgets and the results. Many methods show Canada with a negative remaining budget. Researched and written by: Karine Péloffy, Parliamentary and Legal Affairs Advisor and Nick Zrinyi, Policy Analyst April 2021
3. BC’s Current Targets:
If we add up the emissions, they take us to a world with much more pollution than we ought to have, even if we use an unfair sharing model. The targets aim at dangerous levels of warming - well beyond the Paris Agreement goals.
BC's Targets: The current goals include reducing GHGs by 16% by 2025, 40% by 2030, 60% by 2040, and 80% by 2050.
Budget Translation: If we add up emissions, assuming we decline linearly and meet targets – then current targets result in 50% more than our by-population share and 5x our grandfathering share and by our ‘fair’ share, well, we’re digging ourselves a deeper grave.
Another problem with targets…
Targets with early progress, or delayed progress can have very different outcomes.
The graph below shows a generic zero by 2050 target, and two pathways of getting there. The trajectories don’t look too dissimilar, but the resulting difference is that one has 20% more pollution. And given our history of failing to meet targets, and then re-adjusting them without accounting for past failure… this is big deal.
Conclusion
The distinction between climate budgets and targets is more than academic; it's a matter of urgent global concern.
The world has agreed to what is a safe-ish amount of warming, and in the Paris Agreement most countries have agreed to do their part — each to different extent according to principles of fairness. Canada and all the sub-national jurisdictions within it are abandoning the Paris Agreement and continue business-as-usual, albeit with more climate talk and some climate action. It extremely dangerous, immoral, contrary to the Canadian constitution, and cannot be tolerated.
Targets provide direction, their imprecision and lack of direct alignment with the IPCC carbon budget can lead to misguided efforts and insufficient urgency. Setting a public expectation that we can win back a stable climate by half-measures and tepid policies sets a tone and a pace that is hard to pull back from.
The remaining carbon budget, considering the fair share of responsibility, must be the guiding force behind our climate actions. Targets must be set in direct connection to science, ensuring that our collective efforts are precisely aligned with the imperatives of climate safety. With this clarity of vision, we can mobilize the effort needed to reduce, sequester and support others at the speed and scale necessary.
In a world where every tonne matters, the link between targets and budgets must be clear and precise. Anything less risks a future where targets are met, while the climate is destabilized.
