This first CONSTRAIN report zeroes in on the remaining carbon budget as well as projected surface warming rates over the next 20 years. Both topics are crucially important to the implementation of the Paris Agreement.
Future reports, to be published annually, will provide further information on crucial scientific concepts relevant to the Paris Agreement, as well as background and context on new developments that relate to the science-policy interface.
The 2015 Paris Agreement sets out a global action plan to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C, whilst pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. However, predicting how the climate will change over the next 20-50 years, as well as defining the emissions pathways that will set and keep the world on track, requires a better understanding of how several human and nutural factors will affect the climate in coming decades. These include how atmospheric aerosols affect the Earth's radiation budget, and the roles of clouds and oceans in driving climate change.
The EU-funded CONSTRAIN project, a consortium of 14 European partners, is developing a better understanding of these variables, feeding them into climate models to reduce uncertainties, and creating improved climate projections for the next 20-50 years in regional as well as global scales. In doing so, CONSTRAIN will take full advantage of existing knowledge from the Sixth Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) as well as other Horizon 2020 and European Research Council projects.
