Socio-Political Feedback on the Path to Net Zero

TL;DR

This paper models how socio-political acceptance influences the transition to net-zero emissions, emphasizing the importance of incentives, carbon pricing, and international cooperation to overcome challenges like free-riding and limited investments.

Contribution

It introduces a minimalistic coupled natural-human system model to analyze socio-political factors affecting decarbonization efforts and highlights the roles of incentives and coordination in achieving net-zero.

Findings

Incentives and carbon pricing are crucial for reaching net-zero emissions.

Deep international coordination enhances the effectiveness of climate actions.

Decentralized cooperation can still significantly reduce emissions despite limitations.

Abstract

Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 must soon approach net-zero to stabilize the global mean temperature. Although several international agreements have advocated for coordinated climate actions, their implementation has remained below expectations. One of the main challenges of international cooperation is the different degrees of socio-political acceptance of decarbonization. Here we interrogate a minimalistic model of the coupled natural-human system representing the impact of such socio-political acceptance on clean energy investments and the path to net-zero emissions. We show that incentives and carbon pricing are essential tools to achieve net-zero before critical CO2 concentrations are reached, and deep international coordination is necessary for a rapid and effective transition. Although a perfect coordination scenario remains unlikely, as investments in clean energy are ultimately limited by myopic economic strategies and a policy system that promotes free-riding, more realistic decentralized cooperation with partial efforts from each actor could still lead to significant emissions cuts.