Fig. 1: Global climate refugia implications of CDR deployment (2020–2100).

a, The global share of remaining (remaining per warming level per time step) climate refugia allocated for forestation (afforestation, reforestation and forest restoration) and BECCS. b, The share of remaining climate refugia allocated for forestation across Annex I and non-Annex I countries. c, The ‘net’ effect of forestation and crop-based BECCS on climate refugia by showing the share of remaining climate refugia that would be conserved owing to CDR-related avoided warming, minus climate refugia land allocated for CDR deployment (assuming fully negative effects). Scenarios correspond to RCP1.9 (1.5 °C scenario), RCP2.6 (2 °C scenario) and RCP4.5 (current policies). The line plots show the median and the full range across the considered shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP1-3). Uncertainty ranges also span the potential outcomes from no climate refugia recovery to full recovery after peak warming in the context of overshoot. For each time step, climate refugia data are matched to the warming level of the respective scenario and model framework to dynamically track how much climate refugia is remaining. The underlying global warming information is based on median estimates of the GSAT from the reduced-complexity earth system model MAGICC v7.5.3 and the AR6 best estimate for the TCRE (for details, see Methods). In c, the 1.5 °C scenario for AIM is not shown owing to lacking data on CO₂ removal from forestation. GCAM and REMIND-MAgPIE were not considered for this analysis component as these two models do not report the required AR6 CO₂ removal data or partly lack SSP–RCP combinations. The results for the share of remaining climate refugia allocated for crop-based BECCS across Annex I and non-Annex I countries as well as the warming-related CDR implications are shown in the Supplementary Information.