Agricultural emission reduction targets at country and global levels: a bottom-up analysis

Few countries have declared sector-specific emission reduction targets in agriculture, making it difficult to construct and assess realistic climate mitigation scenarios for analytical and policymaking purposes. We aim to fill this analytical gap by using a set of cluster analyses to gauge likely ambitions levels in reducing agricultural emission at country-level, taking into consideration important country-level characteristics and referencing the ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ principle. We then use the results from the cluster analysis together with information from submitted NDCs and other considerations to design formulas for assigning numerical reduction targets to individual countries. Our main results indicate a global agricultural emission level in 2030 exceeding the limit for the 1.5°C temperature target, but representing substantially lower emissions than the no-policy scenario. At individual country-level, the scenarios consist of large emission reductions in Northern and Western Europe, followed by the USA and other developed economies, and emission increases in many developing countries. To facilitate the construction of alternative scenarios, our method also contains parameters for flexibility to scale up or down ambition levels at both country and global levels, making the method useful for other researchers to develop alternative scenarios.Agricultural emission targets at country and global level are needed for analysing the likely impacts of agricultural decarbonizationOnly 10% of Paris Agreement parties have specific pledges limiting agricultural emissions, indicating an uncertain decarbonization pathway and hindering international climate cooperationOur analysis based on the need, intent, readiness, and scope indicators can guide the construction of plausible mitigation scenarios at country and global levelsBy revealing factors that limit mitigation ambitions, our results can be used to develop instruments at country/multilateral levels to incentivize setting ambitious targetsGlobal agricultural emissions in 2030 in our ‘plausible’ scenario exceeds the 1.5°C target, pointing to the need for enhanced global ambition