The pledges made at COP26 in 2021 exhibited higher ambitions in comparison to those made in 2015. However, despite the increased level of ambition, there remains a significant gap between the commitments and the temperature targets outlined in the Paris Agreement. A study by RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment, and a podcast that explains it.

Lara Aleluia Reis, a scientist at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), together with EIEE Director Massimo Tavoni, conducted a study analyzing the impact of international climate commitments made at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow. During an interview with Resources Radio, she discussed that the primary goal of these pledges was to address climate change and limit global warming to below 2°C. Utilizing the WITCH model, an integrated assessment model, Aleluia Reis and Tavoni assessed the commitments made at COP26 and compared them to the previous commitments established at COP21 in Paris.

“In Paris, we started the pledging review process, where countries would voluntarily make their emissions-reduction pledges, and then there would be a stocktake of all of those pledges,” said Aleluia Reis. “After, there would be a review to ask, ‘Were those pledges enough?’ The idea is that, with every stocktake we do, we raise ambition … Every five years, we would commit to new targets, and these targets would become more ambitious.”

Their analysis revealed that the pledges made at COP26 exhibited higher ambitions in comparison to those made at COP21. However, despite the increased level of ambition, there remains a significant gap between the commitments and the temperature targets outlined in the Paris Agreement. Modeling and assessing the impact of these pledges pose challenges due to their heterogeneity, uncertainty, and long-term nature.

The interview is available on the Resources Radio website and on podcast platforms everywhere, including SoundCloud.

The paper by Lara Aleluia Reis and Massimo Tavoni is available at this link.

Resources Radio is a weekly podcast that features interviews with researchers and leading experts about climate change, energy, ecosystems, and more.

Lara Aleluia Reis is a scientist at EIEE. She holds a PhD in engineering sciences from the University of Luxembourg (2013) and a Master in Environmental Engineering from the New University of Lisbon (2008). During her doctoral studies she has developed a reduced air quality model for an integrated assessment model for air pollution policy. In the context of her PhD studies, she has worked at the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics of the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, as a guest student. She developed an air quality impact module for the WITCH integrated assessment model. She is particularly interested in climate change, integrated assessment approaches, environmental statistics, energy policy, environmental economics, and air pollution and its connections with meteorology and climate.