Significant implications of permafrost thawing for climate change control

• Published in: Climatic Change
• Main Authors: González-Eguino, Mikel, Neumann, Marc B.
• Other Authors: European Commission
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Climatic Change 2016
• Subjects: GLOBAL AND PLANETARY CHANGE; METEOROLOGY AND ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES; Arctic; Gonzalez; Perez; Climate change; permafrost
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10810/20790; https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-016-1666-5

© The Author(s) 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Large amounts of carbon are stored as permafrost within the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. As permafrost thaws due to climate warming, carbon dioxide and methane are released. Recent studies indicate that the pool of carbon susceptible to future thaw is higher than was previously thought and that more carbon could be released by 2100, even under low emission pathways. We use an integrated model of the climate and the economy to study how including these new estimates influence the control of climate change to levels that will likely keep the temperature increase below 2 °C (radiative forcing of 2.6 Wm−2). According to our simulations, the fossil fuel and industrial CO2 emissions need to peak 5–10 years earlier and the carbon budget needs to be reduced by 6–17 % to offset this additional source of warming. The required increase in carbon price implies a 6–21 % higher mitigation cost to society compared to a situation where emissions from permafrost are not considered. Including other positive climate feedbacks, currently not accounted for in integrated assessment models, could further increase these numbers. The authors thank Iñigo Capellán-Perez, Juan-Carlos Ciscar, Thomas Schneider von Deimling, Jon Sampedro, Paul Sztorc, Dirk-Jan. van de Ven and two anonymous referees for valuable comments that helped us improve the manuscript. This study received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 642260 (TRANSrisk project). Mikel Gonzalez-Eguino also acknowledges financial support from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of ...