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Eduardo Robaina
Two numbers. One long-term goal. In 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed to “Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”. It was at COP21, where the Paris Agreement, the most important climate pact to date, was enshrined.
That paragraph, in article 2, paragraph 2.a., marked a before and after. Every policy, law, regulation, study, analysis, proposal or action that has the climate crisis in mind is built on the basis of those two figures: 1.5 and 2. They are our lighthouse. But why are both numbers so important? And what is even less well known: where do they come from?
The answer is neither simple nor short. Like a chicken and egg dilemma, who came up with these goals first, politics or science? In the following lines, we will try to unravel their origins and understand how two numerical targets have ended up guiding and influencing the planet.
Just as the legend that babies come from storks from Paris is not true, temperature limits did not magically appear during the summit in the French capital. Nor did they appear at the same time, nor has the same language always been used to refer to them, as will be seen below.
We have to go back to the last century to find the first references to 2°C. Specifically, to 1975. That year, the American economist and 2018 Nobel laureate William D. Nordhaus published an article in the American Economic Review entitled Can We Control Carbon Dioxide? In it, he argues that “if there were global temperatures more than 2° or 3° above the current average temperature, this would take the climate outside of the range of observations which have been made over the last several hundred thousand years.” Two years later, he publishes another article where he insists on the same idea, and accompanies it with a revealing graph.
Fast forward to 1990. In the same year that the first-ever IPCC report is published, a report by the Stockholm Environment Institute is produced and signed by scientists Frank Rijsberman and Rob J. Swart. In it, they identify “two absolute temperature targets for committed warming.” These limits imply different levels of risk, they say. The first referred to a global average temperature increase of 1°C above pre-industrial times. The second referred to a 2°C warmer planet.
Even then, the authors recognised that “an absolute temperature limit of 2.0°C can be viewed as an upper limit beyond which risks of grave damage to ecosystems, and of non-linear responses, are expected to increase rapidly.” It was accompanied by the following figure:
“Our report was perhaps the first to formulate a recommended provisional temperature target by the scientific community to the world’s policy makers” and “recognized the world would probably already exceed 1 degree warming based on unavoidable emissions,” says Frank Rijsberman, who led the project. He says the work was commissioned by the AGGG (Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases), a body set up in 1985 by the World Meteorological Organisation and UN Environment, which was the precursor to the IPCC, created in 1988. “The workshop was a small affair bringing together some 25 prominent scientists, very unlike the thousands now involved in IPCC,” he explains.
However, Rijsberman believes that the report’s greatest scientific contribution was another. For the first time, it proposed encompassing all the gases that cause global warming in a single indicator. “It was the most controversial and heated debate in the workshop,” recalls Rijsberman, now director of the Global Green Growth Institute. Thirty years later, this novel idea is universally established. It is what we know today as CO2 equivalent (CO2eq).
The next key moment in the 2°C story is no longer scientific, but political. But first, it is important to highlight other milestones that, while not directly addressing these temperature targets, served to put the climate issue on the agenda. On the one hand, there was the forceful intervention on the dangers of climate change by NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. It was 1988, and the expert was already warning about the existence of anthropogenic global warming and how it was influencing extreme events such as heat waves.
Then there was the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Article 2 of the Convention states as its main objective the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” At the time, no mention was made of a temperature limit. For a long time, the debate focused more on CO2 concentrations than on warming levels.
And we reached the political tipping point around the two-degree mark. On June 25-26, 1996, the European Council of Environment Ministers agreed during its meeting that “global average temperatures should not exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial level and that therefore concentration levels lower than 550 ppm CO2 should guide global limitation and reduction efforts.” This is the first time that the 2°C target has made the leap into the political sphere. A decade later, in 2005 and 2007, EU heads of government would confirm this path. Among the signatories of that declaration were former German chancellor Angela Merkel, then environment minister.
“After the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, scientists worked hard to define ‘dangerous climate change,’ usually based on specific ecological limits,” says Piers Forster, Professor of Climate Physics at the University of Leeds with a long history of contributing to IPCC reports. According to the expert, “international policy focused on a CO2 concentration limit until the early 2000s because it had more precedent in the literature, was the basis of the target when UNFCCC was set up and, for a given future emission pathway, could be estimated with more certainty than the level of warming.”
A year before the European Council of Environment Ministers, there was a key milestone in this whole story. The German Advisory Council on Global Change, which produced a series of reports during those years, issued a statement arguing that, in order to achieve “preservation of Creation” and “prevention of excessive costs,” “the temperature span to the tolerable maximum” was “only 1.3°C” compared to 1995, (but compared to pre-industrial times, that maximum limit was 2°C). This institution and its then vice-president – physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who was director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research – were instrumental in convincing Merkel of the importance of the 2°C target, first at the previously mentioned European Environment Council and then, as we shall see, at a G8 summit.
Momentary return to science. In 2002, U.S. scientists Brian C. O’Neill and Michael Oppenheimer published an article in which they spoke of specific risks depending on the degree of warming. Although that study was based on the year 1990, it already stated that “a limit of 2°C above the global average temperature” was vital “to protect the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).” They also advanced the now established fact that “a long-term target of 1°C above 1990 global temperatures would prevent severe damage to some reef systems.”
“At the time, it would have been difficult to differentiate between, for instance, 1.3 and 1.5 or 1.5 and 1.8 in terms of impacts. In fact, it’s still difficult to do so today,” says Oppenheimer. “Most important is that we know every tenth of a degree of warming makes the impacts more and more dangerous and that the higher the temperature, the more and more rapidly the frequency of many types of extreme events increases,” he adds.
Another time jump. It is 2009 and the 35th G8 Summit. The political leaders – including Merkel, Sarkozy, Obama and Berlusconi – sign a declaration in which they recognize “the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above preindustrial levels ought not to exceed 2°C.” Key to this were the IPCC’s Second (1995), Third (2001) and Fourth (2007) Assessment Reports. In all of these there were already projections of temperature increases, including 2°C.
This was coupled with another statement, that of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, which also recognized the importance of limiting warming to below 2ºC. “t was the first time that a consensus had been reached between the main developed and developing countries regarding the 2°C target,” reports a scientific paper published in 2017 that traces the evolution of this target.
At the end of 2009, the Copenhagen climate summit, COP15, was held in Copenhagen. It remains in memory as one of the most disastrous summits ever organized. To some extent it was, as it ended with a text that was not unanimously recognized by all parties and had no legal effect. Even so, it was a major breakthrough as the first COP to mention the temperature goals we are all familiar with today. The outcome document took into account “the scientific view that global temperature increase should remain below 2°C.”
A year later came COP16 in Cancún. The agreement states that “deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required […] so that the global average temperature increase compared to pre-industrial levels is kept below 2°C.”
Finally, in 2015 came the momentous COP21, where the Paris Agreement was sealed. The 2ºC target (and the 1.5ºC target) became the consensus of the international community. Everything had changed forever. And a key point: “The language around 2°C was strengthened in response to emerging science, moving from ‘stay below 2°C’ at the Cancun COP to ‘stay well below 2°C,’ which implies a much higher probability of never exceeding that level,” notes Dr. Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, Head of Climate Science at Climate Analytics.
“The 2°C limit is what we call a social construct. This means that politicians, scientists and policy makers associated with the UN Climate Change Convention process sought a balance between what the science said, the possible impacts, and the amount and speed of mitigation that seemed possible. And, therefore, in being successful in meeting the goal of limiting the temperature to below 2°C,” reflects Pep Canadell, executive director of the benchmark Global Carbon Project, which monitors CO2 emissions each year.
Studies on the dangers of exceeding 2°C warming and political attempts to set it as a target have had a long history. Science has been introducing the idea since the 1970s and, little by little, politics has taken it as a reference to guide climate action. However, the emergence of the 1.5°C limit is more recent and intense.
The story of how that lower limit became enshrined belongs to a large number of small island countries and vulnerable regions. Their territories were going to be the first victims of global warming, so they decided to stand up to the bigger nations for a more ambitious goal. And so they fought. And they won.
In 1990, the article by Frank Rijsberman and Rob J. Swart – mentioned at the beginning – pointed out that “temperature increases beyond 1.0°C may elicit rapid, unpredictable, and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.” In subsequent years, more studies along the same lines followed. However, the exact 1.5°C target emerged less recently than we thought.
The year was 2008. The 14th climate summit was held in Poznan (Poland). It ended without much of a story, with the parties being called to the COP the following year. However, on December 11, in the final stretch of negotiations, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) called for a limit of 1.5°C temperature rise and greenhouse gas concentrations of no more than 350 parts per million, as well as a 40% reduction in developed country emissions by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. For the first time at a COP, a target of 1.5 rather than the 2°C to which the more developed countries were sticking had been put on the table.
Throughout 2009, small island and coastal nations, as well as other vulnerable countries, took advantage of any space where they were present to call for greater climate ambition, with the 1.5 degree limit as the main demand.
The Maldives did so at the sixth preparatory meeting for the COP in Bonn, Germany, and Grenada (on behalf of AOSIS) did so at the seventh meeting. In September of that year, the AOSIS heads of state met in New York, where they agreed on a Declaration on Climate Change. In it, they once again called to “reinforce the UNFCCC process, by calling on the big emitters to agree to produce enough clean energy to attain the targets of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degree Celsius and 350 parts per million of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.”
The Climate Vulnerability Forum (Bangladesh, Barbados, Bhutan, Ghana, Kenya, Kiribati, Maldives, Nepal, Rwanda, Tanzania and Vietnam) also joined the call and decided to issue a statement which, among other issues, called on developed countries “to secure climate justice for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities,” and asked them to commit to “limiting global average surface warming to well below 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”
The work to spread the word about the need for a more ambitious target was intense. “By that time, the 1.5° goal had also been socialized with other groups within the G77 at the request of the AOSIS coordinator and by the AOSIS Shared Vision coordinator,” notes scientist Bill Hare, who recalls that other groups, such as the Independent Association of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC), as well as countries on a bilateral basis, were also consulted.
It is important to note that “achievement of the 1.5 target was not just a series of decisions made at the COP,” says Leon Charles, chief negotiator for AOSIS while his country, Grenada, chaired the group (2007-11). He sees “significant efforts to mobilize and build support as part of an outreach strategy after the target was first presented in Poznan” as key.
The pressure had been sustained throughout 2009 and, with the debate at its peak, a new climate summit – COP15 in Copenhagen – arrived at the end of the year. Thanks to a year of outreach and lobbying, more than 100 developing countries were already supporting the 1.5 target that AOSIS had pushed for at the previous COP.
The need to come out of the summit with a win was vital. So much so, that Tuvalu – the world’s fourth smallest nation – rose up during the negotiations and managed to stop them on several occasions. The tiny Pacific Ocean island of just 12,000 people was insistently demanding, along with AOSIS and LDCs, a legally binding treaty that would keep the temperature rise below 1.5°C. They were simply asking for it. They asked for it simply because with 2°C warming, their territory will succumb to rising sea levels. “How can you ask for my country to become extinct?” Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed asked the Chinese delegate, who asked for the proposal to be removed from the text. They even had a slogan: “1.5 to stay alive”.
The first political stepping stone to push for 1.5 came in 2007. That year, COP13 took place. It concluded the so-called Bali Action Plan. Among other issues, it included the development of “a shared vision for long-term cooperative action, including a long-term global goal for emission reductions.” AOSIS decided to include among its contributions to the plan – which was due to be finalized at COP15 – the 1.5 target. Then came Poznan and Copenhagen, as explained above. But the more scientific origin of the 1.5 remains to be seen. On what basis did island and vulnerable countries claim for so many years a warming target below 1.5°C?
A first origin may be “the ‘burning embers’ graph in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (from 2001), which showed the dire consequences for small island developing states with temperatures above 1°C above pre-industrial levels,” says Ian Fry, Tuvalu’s representative at COP15 and now Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change at the United Nations.
However, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), published in 2007, was more categorical. The alliance of small and most vulnerable countries was concerned that the impacts of 2°C warming described by the UN-linked panel of specialists were too dangerous for them.
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