Melting ice sheets may cause sea level rise in the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS; 20% of UN member states) that is 11% higher than the global average. Because the Paris Agreement targets focus solely on global mean temperatures, rather than including effects such as sea level rise (SLR), outsize negative impacts of climate change on island nations may be ignored in climate mitigation efforts. Melting ice could delay climate mitigation while damaging AOSIS nations more severely than larger nations with higher greenhouse gas emissions.
At the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, countries adopted a target for stabilizing climate change defined by how the rise in global average air temperature has increased relative to a pre-industrial baseline (1850-1900). Prior research has identified numerous climate justice implications associated with this approach.
A study reviews climate justice issues associated with Paris Agreement temperature targets, finding that using air temperature by 2100 as the main metric does not adequately capture other climate risks, particularly sea level rise faced by island and coastal communities.
A new climate justice consideration should be introduced based on the simultaneous impacts of sea level rise and slowed warming caused by ice loss on Antarctica. Slowed warming might appear to delay the need for climate action, but a focus on end-of-century temperature misses the impacts of long-term accelerating sea level rise.
Conclusion
The UNFCCC Article 2 goal of avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system is not fully met when considering the distributive injustices associated with the long time commitment and uneven spatial pattern of rising seas across regional, national and local scales. This is particularly dangerous for AOSIS countries given the normalization of overshoot pathways that GMT (global mean temperature) targets have allowed for.
Citation:
Sadai, S., Spector, R.A., DeConto, R., & Gomez, N. (2022). The Paris Agreement and climate justice: Inequitable impacts of sea level rise associated with temperature targets. Earth’s Future, 10, e2022EF002940. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF002940
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