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.