Land remains a blind spot in tracking progress under the Paris Agreement due to lack of data comparability

Abstract

Land carbon fluxes are key to the Paris Agreement. However, data comparability issues persist between countries’ land greenhouse gas inventories and mitigation targets, and what land models (bookkeeping and integrated assessments) provide as Paris-aligned benchmarks for land. As a result, the Global Stocktake, aiming to track collective mitigation progress, did not explicitly consider country targets for land. This blind spot leaves countries uninformed of the 2030 gap between their ambitions for mitigation on land and models’ benchmarks. Here we track the contribution and evolution of land-related targets under countries’ 2020 Nationally Determined Contributions, splitting land pledges betw..