Projecting a food insecure world: Equity implications of land-based mitigation in IPCC mitigation pathways

Abstract

All modelled global mitigation pathways assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6) project rapid deployment of land-based mitigation measures for staying within the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C or 2 °C. However, there is sparse literature on the burden-sharing and equity implications of the IPCC-assessed global mitigation pathways. This is a severe lacuna given the influential role of the IPCC assessments in shaping political deliberations about possible futures and in informing the sectoral guidance and strategy documents of multilateral climate funds and organisations. This paper addresses this gap by evaluating the distributional implications of IPCC AR6 global mitigation pathways for land-based mitigation, specifically focusing on the Global North and South and socio-economic and political implications for food security. Our findings reveal that the modelled pathways disproportionately distribute the burden of land-based mitigation onto the Global South with an adverse impact on food security, raising questions about the normative choices embedded in cost-optimizing Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). Furthermore, we examine existing scenarios and policy recommendations for addressing food security concerns in stringent climate change mitigation pathways and find them both to be inequitable with attendant feasibility concerns. Our analysis underscores the need for equity-based scenarios in IPCC assessments and calls for transparency in communicating regional distributional assumptions and results of the global mitigation pathways.