🌐 What on earth are Long-term Strategies (LTS) under the Paris Agreement and do they even matter?

😐 Honest admission: I knew/know almost nothing about LTSs. In fact, I barely hear anyone talk about them. One exception is Harry Smith PhD, who actually wrote a full PhD about it.

Here are a few things I learnt in our CDR Policy Scoop with Harry:

🎯 Residual emissions in government plans are double what the CDR community assumes. We often talk about 5-15%. In LTSs, they are often more than double this. An even bigger issue: only 26 countries actually quantified their residual emissions.

🚜 The land sector is doing mitigation work that probably won’t materialise. Country after country is assigning enormous mitigation weight to land use without the modelling to support it, without accounting for resource constraints, and in some cases without acknowledging that their land sink is already collapsing

📄 Long-term strategies are optional, and it shows. Many are a decade old, authored by governments no longer in power, and contain no quantified pathway to net zero. 

🧐 So is there any use in LTSs at all? Short-answer: yes, but in a different way than I expected.

Tune into the full episode to learn more:

🎧 Listen here: https://lnkd.in/egNxtjtn

▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/e8ZfnZ2p

⁉️ What is your take? Have you dealt with LTSs before? Useful or outdated?

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