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Concept
Climate stabilization wedge
Summary
Climate stabilization wedges are used to describe possible climate change mitigation scenarios and their impact, through the grouping of different types of interventions into "wedges" representing potential decreases in . When stacked on top of each other, wedges form a "stabilization triangle" that represents the estimated amount of carbon that needs to be removed from the atmosphere to flatten carbon emissions and prevent atmospheric carbon from doubling. This framework is used to organize complex information about mitigation strategies for presentation to policy makers and the public, with the goal of stimulating both technological change and policy actions to deploy precommercial and existing technologies.
The approach presents global warming as a problem which can be attacked using commercially available technologies to reduce . Selecting a set of mitigation strategies to create a stabilization triangle is a planning framework for identifying possible interventions for the reduction of emissions. The objective is to stabilize CO2 concentrations under 500 ppm over fifty years, by choosing strategies for mitigation as represented by wedges. Each wedge represents 25 gigatons of avoided carbon emissions over a fifty-year period.
This approach to presenting complex information about mitigation was introduced in 2004 by Princeton University researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert H. Socolow.
In 2004, Pacala and Socolow estimated that seven wedges worth of improvements would be needed to mitigate climate change by 2054, if serious actions were taken immediately. In 2011, they increased their estimate from seven to nine wedges, given the ongoing increase in emissions since the original 2004 paper. Some researchers have estimated that the number of wedges needed to mitigate climate change may be much higher. A 2020 update by the Carbon Mitigation Initiative projected mitigation efforts to 2060 with eight wedges. Both the urgency and the difficulty of achieving substantial changes are emphasized.
Official source
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