Fig. 4: International heterogeneity in adaptation-induced cumulative CO₂ emissions.

a The map (produced using Stata software with the spmap package using GADM shapefiles⁷³) and histogram display country-level cumulative adaptation-induced CO₂ emissions in 2099 measured in gigatons of carbon dioxide (GtCO₂) calculated using Eq. (3). b The plot shows a country-level scatter plot of natural log cumulative adaptation-induced CO₂ emissions reductions by 2099 (y-axis) against natural log of present-day CO₂ emissions (x-axis; emissions averaged between 2015 and 2019). The plot also shows the linear model fit (solid line) with 90% confidence interval (shaded area) and point estimate and p-value of the linear coefficient. It also shows a local polynomial fit (dashed line) using an Epanechnikov kernel with a rule-of-thumb bandwidth⁷¹ (N = 121). c Histogram shows the distribution of the country-level ratio of cumulative adaptation-induced CO₂ emissions reductions by 2050 to cumulative CO₂ emissions reduction commitments under Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) taken from ref. ⁴³. A value of 0.5 implies that 50% of NDC commitments are projected to be met by energy-based adaptation alone. a, b show results for the scenario of Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2 paired with Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (SSP2-RCP8.5), while panel c shows projected abatement for 63 countries under SSP5-RCP8.5 for consistency with ref. ⁴³.