Lost options commitment: how short-term policies affect long-term scope of action

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new metric to evaluate how short-term climate policies impact the long-term options available to future generations, highlighting potential dependencies on technological interventions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel commitment metric to quantify the influence of current policies on future generations' scope of action in climate change mitigation.

Findings

Moderate emission scenarios may limit future options.

Future generations might depend on carbon removal or solar radiation techniques.

Short-term policies can have long-lasting implications.

Abstract

We propose to explore the sustainability of climate policies based on a novel commitment metric. This metric allows to quantify how future generations' scope of action is affected by short-term climate policy. In an example application, we show that following a moderate emission scenario like SSP2-4.5 could commit future generations to heavily rely on carbon dioxide removal or/and solar radiation modification to avoid unmanageable sea level rise.