Existing Paris climate pledges commit sea level rise to ‘one metre by 2300’

Nov 8, 2019

Waves crash against the coastal wall in the village of Carnlough as high tides and strong winds cause some flooding in coastal areas of Northern Ireland. Image: REUTERS/Cathal McNaughton

Robert McSweeney

Science Editor, Carbon Brief

Our Impact

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how Climate Change is affecting economies, industries and global issues

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

Climate Change

Charts shows total annual CO2 emissions including land use for the stylised scenario in billion tonnes of carbon per year (left) and the resulting global average temperature (middle) and global average sea level relative to 1985-2006 (right). Bold lines show median projections and shading indicates the 66% range, For sea level rise, the chart also shows projections under RCP2.6 from AR5 and previous studies Mengel et al. (2016), “M16”, and Rogejl et al. (2014), “K17”.

Image: Nauels et al. (2019)

Have you read?

Why the Paris agreement is about more than climate change

Charts show breakdown of emissions (left-hand charts), global temperature (middle) and global sea level rise contributions (right) for the IPCC period (upper row) and the Paris period (lower row) out to 2030, 2100 and 2300, respectively, in the stylised scenario. Emissions in billion tonnes of carbon per year. Sea level rise is relative to 1986-2005. Shading indicates the contributions from China (dark brown), the US (pale brown), the EU28 (mid brown), India (light blue) and Russia (dark blue).

Image: Nauels et al. (2019)

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.