Multi-century global and regional sea-level rise commitments from cumulative greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades

作者：Alexander Nauels, Zebedee Nicholls, Tessa Möller, Tim H. J. Hermans, Matthias Mengel, Uta Kloenne, Chris Smith, Aimée B. A. Slangen, Matthew D. Palmer · 发表于：Nature Climate Change · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1038/s41558-025-02452-5 · 被引用次数：5 · 研究领域：Geophysics and Gravity Measurements、Climate variability and models、demographic modeling and climate adaptation

Sea levels respond to climate change on timescales from decades to millennia. To isolate the sea-level contribution of historical and near-term GHG emissions, we use a dedicated scenario and modelling framework to quantify global and regional sea-level rise commitments of twenty-first century cumulative emissions. Under current climate policies, emissions until 2050 lock in 0.3 m (likely range 0.2–0.5 m) more global mean sea-level rise by 2300 than historical emissions until 2020. This additional commitment would grow to 0.8 m (0.5–1.4 m) for emissions until 2090, of which 0.6 m (0.4–1.1 m) could be avoided under very stringent mitigation. Resulting regional commitments would be around 10% higher than the global signal for the vulnerable Pacific region, mainly due to higher relative Antarctic contributions. Our work shows that multi-century sea-level rise commitments are strongly controlled by mitigation decisions in coming decades. It is important to understand how much long-term sea-level rise is already committed due to historical and near-term emissions. Here the authors use a modelling framework to show how decisions on global emissions reductions in the coming decades alter multi-century sea-level rise projections.