Woodwell Climate @ COP29 | Global Climate Budgets

This COP aspires to align the global climate effort with The Paris Agreement's 1.5 degrees temperature limit. Now if you look at that temperature limit and you look at the science from the ipcc, you can see that that temperature limit means that we can only emit a certain amount of carbon. That amount is about 500 gigatons. That is about 10 years of global emissions. Now our research has shown that that carbon budget might be much than anticipated. It might be much smaller than 500 gigatons because certain natural feedback loops have started operating. There's emissions now coming from permafrost thaw, there's emissions coming from wildfires and also other what we call natural sources. And these sources can mean that it is not 500 gigatons, it might be only 400. So if you talk about the alignment of the global climate effort with the 1.5 limit, then we do have a big problem there based on what our research indicates. So that's kind of one of the main messages we're trying to highlight here.