Climate mitigation outcomes from China-led emission reductions toward global carbon neutrality

While many nations to the Paris Agreement have completed the second-round updates to their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), especially China’s dual carbon commitment, the specific climate outcomes of these latest NDCs remain uncertain. Here, we quantify the potential climate mitigation outcomes from these latest NDCs through ensemble simulations of an Earth System Model under a newly-developed global emission scenario aligned with China’s carbon neutrality pathway. We project a global temperature rise of 2.05°C during 2081–2100 through the implementation of the latest NDCs, demonstrating a likely achievable 2.0°C target without early extensive carbon removal technologies. Moreover, our results demonstrate that the latest NDCs will yield significant long-term climate benefits while incurring adverse near-term impacts, revealing temporally asymmetric climate outcomes when compared to fixing anthropogenic emissions at 2023 levels. We believe this work is valuable for understanding more plausible future climate change, with particular relevance to the ongoing seventh assessment report of the IPCC.