Despite progress since the Paris Agreement, a peak in greenhouse gas emissions is only just within sight – and time is fast running out to stay below 1.5C of human-caused global warming since the preindustrial era.
As a result, almost all pathways that keep 1.5C within reach now involve a temporary “overshoot”.
This term refers to a period where the best estimate of warming exceeds 1.5C, until temperatures are brought back below the limit by removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.
While this idea is growing in prominence, there have only been limited efforts to understand what it would mean to breach the 1.5C limit, even if this is only during a temporary period of overshoot.
In a new Nature paper, we present the findings of a three-year Horizon Europe-funded project, looking at what overshoot means for emissions, temperatures, climate impacts and adaptation.
Our results show that overshooting 1.5C comes with significant uncertainty in terms of warming outcomes, climate impacts and associated risks. For example, climate uncertainty means that what is referred to as a 1.5C “pathway” carries a notable risk of much greater levels of warming.
In order to hedge against the risk of higher-than-expected warming, the world would need to develop substantial capacity for “net-negative” CO2 emissions. This could be used to reverse a temporary overshoot and reduce long-term risks, if warming is no more extreme than expected.
Even so, overshoot would come with irreversible consequences for humans and ecosystems, our research finds, such as rising sea levels and ecosystem loss.
Overshoot overconfidence
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been key to shaping our understanding of overshoot scenarios. In its latest sixth assessment report (AR6), the IPCC considered a range of pathways that limit median warming in 2100 to below 1.5C.
The report categorised the pathways according to their probability of breaching 1.5C, but also offered information on the amount of any expected overshoot.
Specifically, the C1 “no or limited overshoot” pathways allow an overshoot of “up to about 0.1C”. The C2 pathways return warming to 1.5C “after a high overshoot” of between “0.1C-0.3C”.
These categorisations give the impression that overshoot can be neatly and confidently constrained – to within a few tenths of a degree – and that in choosing a particular pathway, the countries of the world would have full control over the planetary thermostat.
Crucially, however, the numbers refer only to median warming outcomes. Considering the uncertainties in Earth system feedbacks, it is not possible to rule out much higher peak warming. For example, this could be up to 2.5C under C2 scenarios (at the 95th percentile of all model runs).
If the increase in temperatures is indeed much higher than expected under median warming, or if warming continues even when CO2 emissions reach net-zero, then returning to below 1.5C after an overshoot would require much more CO2 removal than thought.
Even with stringent emissions reductions, we therefore cannot rule out the possibility that reversing a 1.5C overshoot would require the removal of hundreds of billions of tonnes CO2 by 2100.
Indeed, based on the simple climate model FaIR, our findings show that 400GtCO2 of additional removals could be needed to return temperatures to 1.5C by 2100, if warming reaches the 75th percentile of expected levels rather than the median (about 1.7C instead of 1.5C, an outcome with a likelihood of one-in-four).
(This is based on generating more than 2,000 physically plausible climate outcomes for an emission pathway that limits median warming to around 1.5C and achieves net-zero CO2 by around mid-century, without the need for net-negative emissions thereafter.)
To reach 400GtCO2 of removals by 2100 would mean taking nearly 10GtCO2 out of the atmosphere every year after global CO2 emissions reach net-zero. For comparison, current removals amount to around 2GtCO2 per year, from all sources.
The 400GtCO2 of removals that could be needed to deal with higher-than-expected warming is similar to the amount of removals that is typically being relied on in 1.5C pathways, assuming median levels of warming in response to a given level of emissions.
This is shown in the figure below, where the first row illustrates the range of cumulative CO2 removal needed to return temperatures to below 1.5C by 2100, depending on how sensitive the climate is to a given level of emissions. The bottom two rows show removals in C1 “no or limited overshoot” and C2 “high overshoot” 1.5C pathways, assuming a median warming response.
Our findings imply the world may therefore need a “preventive” capacity to remove hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 by 2100, to hedge against the risk of higher-than-expected warming.
Moreover, given the political, economic, sustainability and other constraints on the speed and scale at which CO2 removal can be scaled up, it therefore may not be possible to rely on removals to compensate for a failure to reduce emissions in other parts of the economy.
Irreversible impacts
If warming is no more severe than expected under median outcomes, then preventive CO2 removal capacity could be used to steadily reduce temperatures after overshoot.
This could be an important way to minimise long-term climate risks following overshoot.
For example, for every 100 years of overshoot above 1.5C, our findings show that there would be an additional 40cm of sea-level rise by 2300. There would be similarly irreversible consequences for the world’s frozen ecosystems, such as permafrost and peatlands.
In addition, overshoot increases the risk of crossing irreversible climate “tipping points”.
These findings show that even if a global temperature overshoot is reversed, the temporary breach of the 1.5C limit would still come with some irreversible consequences.
Peak and decline
Our study offers a framework for minimising the risks associated with higher-than-expected warming and potentially irreversible climate impacts after temperature overshoot.
Instead of the current categories of mitigation pathway, which focus on peak warming and end-of-century temperatures – apparently with a high level of precision – our paper suggests “peak and decline” (PD) scenarios that allow us to consider a wide range of plausible climate outcomes.
These scenarios aim to achieve a peak in warming, followed by sustained temperature reductions during a period of at least several decades. Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would need to decline towards net-zero CO2 to achieve temperature peaking, followed by net-negative CO2 emissions to enter a long-term decline.
The “peak” is determined by how fast emissions are reduced in the near term, towards reaching net-zero CO2 emissions. This determines the maximum cumulative CO2 emissions of a pathway and therefore the level and timing of peak warming. Importantly, the stringency of non-CO2 GHG emission reductions will also strongly affect peak warming.
The pace of global temperature “decline” after the peak – and therefore the ability to reverse a temporary exceedance of a target limit – depends on the level of net-negative CO2 emissions that can be achieved.
In PD “overshoot” pathways (PD-OS), warming exceeds 1.5C before returning to that level and staying there into the future. These are similar to PD pathways, but the carbon budget, timing of net-zero CO2 and amount of CO2 removal depends on the length, level and timing of overshoot.
In PD “enhanced protection” pathways (PD-EP), warming is kept as low as possible and gradually reversed over time, to minimise climate risks. They entail stringent, rapid cuts in GHG emissions, achieving net-zero CO2 as soon as possible and using sustainable levels of CO2 removal to reduce warming over time, potentially reaching net-zero or even net-negative GHGs.
These pathways are illustrated in the figure below, where the 1.5C limit is shown as a horizontal dotted line, and the different peak and decline pathways are contrasted with a scenario in which temperatures continue to increase, despite reaching net-zero CO2.
Our findings suggest that a peak and decline “enhanced protection” pathway would offer the best way to hedge against the uncertainties and minimise the risks around overshoot and the response of the climate system. This would entail two actions from countries worldwide.
First, it would mean reducing emissions as fast as possible to slow down temperature increase, reduce peak warming, and reduce the dependency of needing large amounts of CO2 removals to even achieve net-zero CO2 emissions.
Second, it would mean rapidly scaling up global capacity for CO2 removal to hedge against high-risk outcomes from stronger than expected climate feedback.
The scale of preventive removal capacity that we estimate could be needed, is only just achievable within sustainable limits. If some removal capacity is used to compensate for a failure to rapidly reduce emissions, then it would not be available to manage higher-than-expected warming.
Overall, our paper reinforces the idea that earlier emissions reductions are the best way to minimise far-reaching climate risks in the 21st century and beyond.
The post Guest post: How to minimise the risks from overshooting the 1.5C limit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How to minimise the risks from overshooting the 1.5C limit
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.
98
The number of nations that submitted their national reports on tackling nature loss to the UN on time – just half of the 196 countries that are part of the UN biodiversity treaty – according to analysis by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Sea levels are already “much higher than assumed” in most assessments of the threat posed by sea-level rise, due to “inadequate” modelling assumptions | Nature
- Accelerating human-caused global warming could see the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit crossed before 2030 | Geophysical Research Letters covered by Carbon Brief
- Future “super El Niño events” could “significantly lower” solar power generation due to a reduction in solar irradiance in key regions, such as California and east China | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)