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    Management-induced changes in soil organic carbon on global croplands
    (Katlenburg-Lindau [u.a.] : Copernicus, 2022) Karstens, Kristine; Bodirsky, Benjamin Leon; Dietrich, Jan Philipp; Dondini, Marta; Heinke, Jens; Kuhnert, Matthias; Müller, Christoph; Rolinski, Susanne; Smith, Pete; Weindl, Isabelle; Lotze-Campen, Hermann; Popp, Alexander
    Soil organic carbon (SOC), one of the largest terrestrial carbon (C) stocks on Earth, has been depleted by anthropogenic land cover change and agricultural management. However, the latter has so far not been well represented in global C stock assessments. While SOC models often simulate detailed biochemical processes that lead to the accumulation and decay of SOC, the management decisions driving these biophysical processes are still little investigated at the global scale. Here we develop a spatially explicit data set for agricultural management on cropland, considering crop production levels, residue returning rates, manure application, and the adoption of irrigation and tillage practices. We combine it with a reduced-complexity model based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tier 2 method to create a half-degree resolution data set of SOC stocks and SOC stock changes for the first 30 cm of mineral soils. We estimate that, due to arable farming, soils have lost around 34.6 GtC relative to a counterfactual hypothetical natural state in 1975. Within the period 1975-2010, this SOC debt continued to expand by 5 GtC (0.14 GtCyr-1) to around 39.6 GtC. However, accounting for historical management led to 2.1 GtC fewer (0.06 GtCyr-1) emissions than under the assumption of constant management. We also find that management decisions have influenced the historical SOC trajectory most strongly by residue returning, indicating that SOC enhancement by biomass retention may be a promising negative emissions technique. The reduced-complexity SOC model may allow us to simulate management-induced SOC enhancement - also within computationally demanding integrated (land use) assessment modeling.
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    A protocol for an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized land-use and climate scenarios
    (Katlenburg-Lindau : Copernicus, 2018) Kim, HyeJin; Rosa, Isabel M. D.; Alkemade, Rob; Leadley, Paul; Hurtt, George; Popp, Alexander; van Vuuren, Detlef P.; Anthoni, Peter; Arneth, Almut; Baisero, Daniele; Caton, Emma; Chaplin-Kramer, Rebecca; Chini, Louise; De Palma, Adriana; Di Fulvio, Fulvio; Di Marco, Moreno; Espinoza, Felipe; Ferrier, Simon; Fujimori, Shinichiro; Gonzalez, Ricardo E.; Gueguen, Maya; Guerra, Carlos; Harfoot, Mike; Harwood, Thomas D.; Hasegawa, Tomoko; Haverd, Vanessa; Havlík, Petr; Hellweg, Stefanie; Hill, Samantha L. L.; Hirata, Akiko; Hoskins, Andrew J.; Janse, Jan H.; Jetz, Walter; Johnson, Justin A.; Krause, Andreas; Leclère, David; Martins, Ines S.; Matsui, Tetsuya; Merow, Cory; Obersteiner, Michael; Ohashi, Haruka; Poulter, Benjamin; Purvis, Andy; Quesada, Benjamin; Rondinini, Carlo; Schipper, Aafke M.; Sharp, Richard; Takahashi, Kiyoshi; Thuiller, Wilfried; Titeux, Nicolas; Visconti, Piero; Ware, Christopher; Wolf, Florian; Pereira, Henrique M.
    To support the assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the IPBES Expert Group on Scenarios and Models is carrying out an intercomparison of biodiversity and ecosystem services models using harmonized scenarios (BES-SIM). The goals of BES-SIM are (1) to project the global impacts of land-use and climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services (i.e., nature's contributions to people) over the coming decades, compared to the 20th century, using a set of common metrics at multiple scales, and (2) to identify model uncertainties and research gaps through the comparisons of projected biodiversity and ecosystem services across models. BES-SIM uses three scenarios combining specific Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)-SSP1xRCP2.6, SSP3xRCP6.0, SSP5xRCP8.6-to explore a wide range of land-use change and climate change futures. This paper describes the rationale for scenario selection, the process of harmonizing input data for land use, based on the second phase of the Land Use Harmonization Project (LUH2), and climate, the biodiversity and ecosystem services models used, the core simulations carried out, the harmonization of the model output metrics, and the treatment of uncertainty. The results of this collaborative modeling project will support the ongoing global assessment of IPBES, strengthen ties between IPBES and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios and modeling processes, advise the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) on its development of a post-2020 strategic plans and conservation goals, and inform the development of a new generation of nature-centred scenarios.
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    The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) for CMIP6
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2016) O'Neill, Brian C.; Tebaldi, Claudia; van Vuuren, Detlef P.; Eyring, Veronika; Friedlingstein, Pierre; Hurtt, George; Knutti, Reto; Kriegler, Elmar; Lamarque, Jean-Francois; Lowe, Jason; Meehl, Gerald A.; Moss, Richard; Riahi, Keywan; Sanderson, Benjamin M.
    Projections of future climate change play a fundamental role in improving understanding of the climate system as well as characterizing societal risks and response options. The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project (ScenarioMIP) is the primary activity within Phase 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) that will provide multi-model climate projections based on alternative scenarios of future emissions and land use changes produced with integrated assessment models. In this paper, we describe ScenarioMIP's objectives, experimental design, and its relation to other activities within CMIP6. The ScenarioMIP design is one component of a larger scenario process that aims to facilitate a wide range of integrated studies across the climate science, integrated assessment modeling, and impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability communities, and will form an important part of the evidence base in the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessments. At the same time, it will provide the basis for investigating a number of targeted science and policy questions that are especially relevant to scenario-based analysis, including the role of specific forcings such as land use and aerosols, the effect of a peak and decline in forcing, the consequences of scenarios that limit warming to below 2°C, the relative contributions to uncertainty from scenarios, climate models, and internal variability, and long-term climate system outcomes beyond the 21st century. To serve this wide range of scientific communities and address these questions, a design has been identified consisting of eight alternative 21st century scenarios plus one large initial condition ensemble and a set of long-term extensions, divided into two tiers defined by relative priority. Some of these scenarios will also provide a basis for variants planned to be run in other CMIP6-Endorsed MIPs to investigate questions related to specific forcings. Harmonized, spatially explicit emissions and land use scenarios generated with integrated assessment models will be provided to participating climate modeling groups by late 2016, with the climate model simulations run within the 2017–2018 time frame, and output from the climate model projections made available and analyses performed over the 2018–2020 period.
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    Ensemble simulations for the RCP8.5-Scenario
    (Stuttgart : Gebrueder Borntraeger Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2015) Gerstengarbe, F.-W.; Hoffmann, P.; Österle, H.; Werner, P.C.
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    Incremental improvements of 2030 targets insufficient to achieve the Paris Agreement goals
    (Göttingen : Copernicus Publ., 2020) Geiges, Andreas; Nauels, Alexander; Yanguas Parra, Paola; Andrijevic, Marina; Hare, William; Pfleiderer, Peter; Schaeffer, Michiel; Schleussner, Carl-Friedrich
    Current global mitigation ambition up to 2030 under the Paris Agreement, reflected in the National Determined Contributions (NDCs), is insufficient to achieve the agreement's 1.5 °C long-term temperature limit. As governments are preparing new and updated NDCs for 2020, the question as to how much collective improvement is achieved is a pivotal one for the credibility of the international climate regime. The recent Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assessed a wide range of scenarios that achieve the 1.5 °C limit. Those pathways are characterised by a substantial increase in near-term action and total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels about 50 % lower than what is implied by current NDCs. Here we assess the outcomes of different scenarios of NDC updating that fall short of achieving this 1.5 °C benchmark. We find that incremental improvements in reduction targets, even if achieved globally, are insufficient to align collective ambition with the goals of the Paris Agreement. We provide estimates for global mean temperature increase by 2100 for different incremental NDC update scenarios and illustrate climate impacts under those median scenarios for extreme temperature, long-term sea-level rise and economic damages for the most vulnerable countries. Under the assumption of maintaining ambition as reflected in current NDCs up to 2100 and beyond, we project a reduction in the gross domestic product (GDP) in tropical countries of around 60 % compared to a no-climate-change scenario and median long-term sea-level rise of close to 2 m in 2300. About half of these impacts can be avoided by limiting warming to 1.5 °C or below. Scenarios of more incremental NDC improvements do not lead to comparable reductions in climate impacts. An increase in aggregated NDC ambition of big emitters by 33 % in 2030 does not reduce presented climate impacts by more than about half compared to limiting warming to 1.5 °C. Our results underscore that a transformational increase in 2030 ambition is required to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. © 2020 SPIE. All rights reserved.
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    Comparing climate projections to observations up to 2011
    (Bristol : IOP Publishing, 2012) Rahmstorf, Stefan; Foster, Grant; Cazenave, Anny
    We analyse global temperature and sea-level data for the past few decades and compare them to projections published in the third and fourth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The results show that global temperature continues to increase in good agreement with the best estimates of the IPCC, especially if we account for the effects of short-term variability due to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, volcanic activity and solar variability. The rate of sea-level rise of the past few decades, on the other hand, is greater than projected by the IPCC models. This suggests that IPCC sea-level projections for the future may also be biased low.
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    Assessing the impacts of 1.5 °C global warming – simulation protocol of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP2b)
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2017) Frieler, Katja; Lange, Stefan; Piontek, Franziska; Reyer, Christopher P.O.; Schewe, Jacob; Warszawski, Lila; Zhao, Fang; Chini, Louise; Denvil, Sebastien; Emanuel, Kerry; Geiger, Tobias; Halladay, Kate; Hurtt, George; Mengel, Matthias; Murakami, Daisuke; Ostberg, Sebastian; Popp, Alexander; Riva, Riccardo; Stevanovic, Miodrag; Suzuki, Tatsuo; Volkholz, Jan; Burke, Eleanor; Ciais, Philippe; Ebi, Kristie; Eddy, Tyler D.; Elliott, Joshua; Galbraith, Eric; Gosling, Simon N.; Hattermann, Fred; Hickler, Thomas; Hinkel, Jochen; Hof, Christian; Huber, Veronika; Jägermeyr, Jonas; Krysanova, Valentina; Marcé, Rafael; Müller Schmied, Hannes; Mouratiadou, Ioanna; Pierson, Don; Tittensor, Derek P.; Vautard, Robert; van Vliet, Michelle; Biber, Matthias F.; Betts, Richard A.; Bodirsky, Benjamin Leon; Deryng, Delphine; Frolking, Steve; Jones, Chris D.; Lotze, Heike K.; Lotze-Campen, Hermann; Sahajpal, Ritvik; Thonicke, Kirsten; Tian, Hanqin; Yamagata, Yoshiki
    In Paris, France, December 2015, the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) invited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide a "special report in 2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways". In Nairobi, Kenya, April 2016, the IPCC panel accepted the invitation. Here we describe the response devised within the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) to provide tailored, cross-sectorally consistent impact projections to broaden the scientific basis for the report. The simulation protocol is designed to allow for (1) separation of the impacts of historical warming starting from pre-industrial conditions from impacts of other drivers such as historical land-use changes (based on pre-industrial and historical impact model simulations); (2) quantification of the impacts of additional warming up to 1.5°C, including a potential overshoot and long-term impacts up to 2299, and comparison to higher levels of global mean temperature change (based on the low-emissions Representative Concentration Pathway RCP2.6 and a no-mitigation pathway RCP6.0) with socio-economic conditions fixed at 2005 levels; and (3) assessment of the climate effects based on the same climate scenarios while accounting for simultaneous changes in socio-economic conditions following the middle-of-the-road Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP2, Fricko et al., 2016) and in particular differential bioenergy requirements associated with the transformation of the energy system to comply with RCP2.6 compared to RCP6.0. With the aim of providing the scientific basis for an aggregation of impacts across sectors and analysis of cross-sectoral interactions that may dampen or amplify sectoral impacts, the protocol is designed to facilitate consistent impact projections from a range of impact models across different sectors (global and regional hydrology, lakes, global crops, global vegetation, regional forests, global and regional marine ecosystems and fisheries, global and regional coastal infrastructure, energy supply and demand, temperature-related mortality, and global terrestrial biodiversity).
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    Historical and idealized climate model experiments: An intercomparison of Earth system models of intermediate complexity
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2013) Eby, M.; Weaver, A.J.; Alexander, K.; Zickfeld, K.; Abe-Ouchi, A.; Cimatoribus, A.A.; Crespin, E.; Drijfhout, S.S.; Edwards, N.R.; Eliseev, A.V.; Feulner, G.; Fichefet, T.; Forest, C.E.; Goosse, H.; Holden, P.B.; Joos, F.; Kawamiya, M.; Kicklighter, D.; Kienert, H.; Matsumoto, K.; Mokhov, I.I.; Monier, E.; Olsen, S.M.; Pedersen, J.O.P.; Perrette, M.; Philippon-Berthier, G.; Ridgwell, A.; Schlosser, A.; Schneider von Deimling, T.; Shaffer, G.; Smith, R.S.; Spahni, R.; Sokolov, A.P.; Steinacher, M.; Tachiiri, K.; Tokos, K.; Yoshimori, M.; Zeng, N.; Zhao, F.
    Both historical and idealized climate model experiments are performed with a variety of Earth system models of intermediate complexity (EMICs) as part of a community contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report. Historical simulations start at 850 CE and continue through to 2005. The standard simulations include changes in forcing from solar luminosity, Earth's orbital configuration, CO2, additional greenhouse gases, land use, and sulphate and volcanic aerosols. In spite of very different modelled pre-industrial global surface air temperatures, overall 20th century trends in surface air temperature and carbon uptake are reasonably well simulated when compared to observed trends. Land carbon fluxes show much more variation between models than ocean carbon fluxes, and recent land fluxes appear to be slightly underestimated. It is possible that recent modelled climate trends or climate–carbon feedbacks are overestimated resulting in too much land carbon loss or that carbon uptake due to CO2 and/or nitrogen fertilization is underestimated. Several one thousand year long, idealized, 2 × and 4 × CO2 experiments are used to quantify standard model characteristics, including transient and equilibrium climate sensitivities, and climate–carbon feedbacks. The values from EMICs generally fall within the range given by general circulation models. Seven additional historical simulations, each including a single specified forcing, are used to assess the contributions of different climate forcings to the overall climate and carbon cycle response. The response of surface air temperature is the linear sum of the individual forcings, while the carbon cycle response shows a non-linear interaction between land-use change and CO2 forcings for some models. Finally, the preindustrial portions of the last millennium simulations are used to assess historical model carbon-climate feedbacks. Given the specified forcing, there is a tendency for the EMICs to underestimate the drop in surface air temperature and CO2 between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age estimated from palaeoclimate reconstructions. This in turn could be a result of unforced variability within the climate system, uncertainty in the reconstructions of temperature and CO2, errors in the reconstructions of forcing used to drive the models, or the incomplete representation of certain processes within the models. Given the forcing datasets used in this study, the models calculate significant land-use emissions over the pre-industrial period. This implies that land-use emissions might need to be taken into account, when making estimates of climate–carbon feedbacks from palaeoclimate reconstructions.
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    MAgPIE 4-a modular open-source framework for modeling global land systems
    (Göttingen : Copernicus GmbH, 2019) Dietrich, J.P.; Bodirsky, B.L.; Humpenöder, F.; Weindl, I.; Stevanović, M.; Karstens, K.; Kreidenweis, U.; Wang, X.; Mishra, A.; Klein, D.; Ambrósio, G.; Araujo, E.; Yalew, A.W.; Baumstark, L.; Wirth, S.; Giannousakis, A.; Beier, F.; Meng-Chuen, Chen, D.; Lotze-Campen, H.; Popp, A.
    The open-source modeling framework MAgPIE (Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment) combines economic and biophysical approaches to simulate spatially explicit global scenarios of land use within the 21st century and the respective interactions with the environment. Besides various other projects, it was used to simulate marker scenarios of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and contributed substantially to multiple IPCC assessments. However, with growing scope and detail, the non-linear model has become increasingly complex, computationally intensive and non-transparent, requiring structured approaches to improve the development and evaluation of the model. Here, we provide an overview on version 4 of MAgPIE and how it addresses these issues of increasing complexity using new technical features: modular structure with exchangeable module implementations, flexible spatial resolution, in-code documentation, automatized code checking, model/output evaluation and open accessibility. Application examples provide insights into model evaluation, modular flexibility and region-specific analysis approaches. While this paper is focused on the general framework as such, the publication is accompanied by a detailed model documentation describing contents and equations, and by model evaluation documents giving insights into model performance for a broad range of variables. With the open-source release of the MAgPIE 4 framework, we hope to contribute to more transparent, reproducible and collaborative research in the field. Due to its modularity and spatial flexibility, it should provide a basis for a broad range of land-related research with economic or biophysical, global or regional focus.
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    The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report WGIII climate assessment of mitigation pathways: from emissions to global temperatures
    (Katlenburg-Lindau : Copernicus, 2022) Kikstra, Jarmo S.; Nicholls, Zebedee R. J.; Smith, Christopher J.; Lewis, Jared; Lamboll, Robin D.; Byers, Edward; Sandstad, Marit; Meinshausen, Malte; Gidden, Matthew J.; Rogelj, Joeri; Kriegler, Elmar; Peters, Glen P.; Fuglestvedt, Jan S.; Skeie, Ragnhild B.; Samset, Bjørn H.; Wienpahl, Laura; van Vuuren, Detlef P.; van der Wijst, Kaj-Ivar; Al Khourdajie, Alaa; Forster, Piers M.; Reisinger, Andy; Schaeffer, Roberto; Riahi, Keywan
    While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) physical science reports usually assess a handful of future scenarios, the Working Group III contribution on climate mitigation to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6 WGIII) assesses hundreds to thousands of future emissions scenarios. A key task in WGIII is to assess the global mean temperature outcomes of these scenarios in a consistent manner, given the challenge that the emissions scenarios from different integrated assessment models (IAMs) come with different sectoral and gas-to-gas coverage and cannot all be assessed consistently by complex Earth system models. In this work, we describe the "climate-assessment"workflow and its methods, including infilling of missing emissions and emissions harmonisation as applied to 1202 mitigation scenarios in AR6 WGIII. We evaluate the global mean temperature projections and effective radiative forcing (ERF) characteristics of climate emulators FaIRv1.6.2 and MAGICCv7.5.3 and use the CICERO simple climate model (CICERO-SCM) for sensitivity analysis. We discuss the implied overshoot severity of the mitigation pathways using overshoot degree years and look at emissions and temperature characteristics of scenarios compatible with one possible interpretation of the Paris Agreement. We find that the lowest class of emissions scenarios that limit global warming to "1.5 ° C (with a probability of greater than 50 %) with no or limited overshoot"includes 97 scenarios for MAGICCv7.5.3 and 203 for FaIRv1.6.2. For the MAGICCv7.5.3 results, "limited overshoot"typically implies exceedance of median temperature projections of up to about 0.1 ° C for up to a few decades before returning to below 1.5 ° C by or before the year 2100. For more than half of the scenarios in this category that comply with three criteria for being "Paris-compatible", including net-zero or net-negative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, median temperatures decline by about 0.3-0.4 ° C after peaking at 1.5-1.6 ° C in 2035-2055. We compare the methods applied in AR6 with the methods used for SR1.5 and discuss their implications. This article also introduces a "climate-assessment"Python package which allows for fully reproducing the IPCC AR6 WGIII temperature assessment. This work provides a community tool for assessing the temperature outcomes of emissions pathways and provides a basis for further work such as extending the workflow to include downscaling of climate characteristics to a regional level and calculating impacts.