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A risk-based, spatially explicit analysis of carbon storage in sedimentary basins establishes a prudent planetary limit of around 1,460 Gt of geological carbon storage, which requires making explicit decisions on priorities for storage use.

Scenario ensembles are widely used in climate change research, while their opportunistic nature could lead to biased outcomes in following analysis. Focusing on relevance, quality and diversity, researchers develop a simple and transparent weighting framework to address these challenges.

Aligning the IPCC-assessed mitigation pathways with the national greenhouse gas inventories shows that key global mitigation benchmarks become harder to achieve, requiring achieving earlier net-zero and lower cumulative emissions.

Current pledges for emissions cuts are insufficient to meet the Paris Agreement temperature goal. The wave of net zero targets being discussed and adopted could make the Paris goal possible if further countries follow suit.

Without additional support policies, clean cooking could become unaffordable for about 470 million people by 2030 if a post-pandemic recovery is slow, and about 200 million people by 2030 under ambitious climate mitigation action. Acceleration of clean cooking transitions by tapping into pandemic recovery and climate funds to target the poorest people and regions globally is urgently needed.

To evaluate the effectiveness of current national policies in achieving global temperature targets is important but a systematic multi-model evaluation is still lacking. Here the authors identified a reduction of 3.5 GtCO₂ eq of current national policies relative to a baseline scenario without climate policies by 2030 due to the increasing low carbon share of final energy and the improving final energy intensity.

This study used AI to map ~29,000 CDR studies—3–4 times more than expected—showing rapid but uneven growth. The map supports stronger evidence synthesis for climate goals and the IPCC. #CDR

Climate science and national emissions reporting communities have historically used different definitions and methods for anthropogenic land-based carbon removals. As the mitigation agenda accelerates, reconciling these differences for comparability and moving towards integration is crucial for enhancing confidence in land-use emission estimates.

Here the authors present a framework to assess the temperature outcomes of decarbonization scenarios from institutions such as the IEA, BP and Shell. Scenarios are evaluated for consistency with the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.

The scale and nature of energy investments under diverging technology and policy futures is of great importance to decision makers. Here, a multi-model study projects investment needs under countries’ nationally determined contributions and in pathways consistent with achieving the 2 °C and 1.5 °C targets as well as certain SDGs.

Aiming for declining global temperatures can limit long-term climate risks compared with a mere stabilization of global warming, including sea-level rise and cryosphere changes.

Meeting the Paris Agreement targets requires deep emissions reductions supported by a scale-up in carbon dioxide removal. However, current country-reported mitigation pledges are off track to meet carbon dioxide removal needs, unless countries dramatically reduce emissions consistent with low-energy-demand scenarios.

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be required to achieve 1.5 °C or well below 2 °C climate targets. Analysis of equitable distributions of CDR responsibility shows 2–3 times larger responsibility on large emitters such as the United States, China and the European Union than under a least-cost approach.

Reduced GHG and air pollutant emissions during the COVID-19 lockdowns resulted in declines in NO_x emissions of up to 30%, causing short-term cooling, while ~20% SO₂ emissions decline countered this for overall minimal temperature effect.

Fundamental value judgments about acceptable maximum levels of climate change and future reliance on controversial technologies can be made explicitly in climate scenarios, thereby addressing the intergenerational bias present in the scenario literature.

Carbon dioxide removals (CDR) have been integrated into country-submitted reports under the Paris Agreement. However, this Analysis finds a gap between levels of CDR in these national proposals and the scenarios limiting global warming to the 1.5 °C target.

Carbon dioxide removal via afforestation and reforestation could be scaled up globally to account for ten percent of net greenhouse gas emission reductions required between 2020 and 2030, according to an analysis of land-based carbon removal deployed in the IPCC-assessed scenarios.

Discrepancies exist between data used in countries’ greenhouse gas inventories and modelled benchmarks for the Paris agreement, according to an analysis of countries’ land-based greenhouse gas targets.

Many socioeconomic growth and low-emission energy scenarios do not consider impacts on clean cooking access and have yet to account for the COVID pandemic. Pachauri et al. now examine how clean cooking access evolves under various scenarios post COVID and find the need for policy focused on increasing access more urgent.

Richard Houlston and colleagues report a genome-wide association study for colorectal cancer. They report three loci newly associated with colorectal cancer, bringing the total number of common susceptibility loci to 20.

Greenhouse gas emissions pathways compatible with the Paris Agreement simultaneously pursue warming of less than 1.5 °C, very likely never exceed 2 °C and achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the second half of the century. They can require smaller amounts of carbon dioxide removal.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is a key element of any mitigation strategy aiming to achieve the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement, as well as national net-zero and net-negative greenhouse gas emissions targets. For robust CDR policy, the credibility of certification schemes is essential.