A team of researchers from the University of Barcelona, Spain, mapped the oil resources that should not be used if we want to meet the Paris Agreement commitments, according to a study published in Nature Communications.
To avoid increases in temperature above 1.5°C, we need to reduce carbon dioxide emission in the atmosphere. In practical terms, this means not using most of the existing coal, gas, and oil in many regions worldwide. To understand how this affects us now, the team designed a world map highlighting which resources around the world should not be exploited to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 to control the effects of climate change.
The map shows that is essential to avoid the exploitation of oil resources in the most socio-environmentally sensitive areas, including protected nature reserves, priority areas for biodiversity conservation and areas of high endemic species richness, among others. However, the authors warn that just avoiding these areas is not enough to keep up with the Paris Agreement, we need to do more.
“Our study reveals which oil resources should be kept underground and not commercially exploited, with special attention to those deposits that overlap with areas of high endemic richness or coincide with outstanding socio-environmental values in different regions of the planet. The results show that the exploitation of the selected resources and reserves is totally incompatible with the achievement of the Paris Agreement commitments”, says Professor Martí Orta-Martínez from the UB’s Faculty of Biology and the UB Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio).
There is now a broad consensus among the scientific community that we need to limit global warming to 1.5°C to avoid irreversible damage to the planet, including melting permafrost, loss of Arctic sea ice and the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, forest fires in boreal forests. “If these thresholds are exceeded, this could lead to an abrupt release of carbon into the atmosphere (climate feedback)”, said Orta-Martínez, this would “amplify the effects of climate change and trigger a cascade of effects that commit the world to large-scale, irreversible changes”.
To achieve this, researchers have calculated the total amount of CO2 emissions that we can release. This is known as remaining carbon budget. In January 2023, the remaining carbon budget was about 250 gigatonnes of CO₂ (GtCO2). “This budget is steadily decreasing at current rates of human-induced emissions — about 42 GtCO2 per year — and will be completely used up by 2028,” said researcher Lorenzo Pellegrini from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands.
If we were to use all of the planet’s fossil fuel resources, we would exceed the carbon budget by more than forty times. “In addition, the combustion of developed fossil fuel reserves — i.e., those reserves of oil and gas fields and coal mines currently in production or under construction — will emit 936 GtCO2, four times more than the remaining carbon budget for a global warming of 1.5°C,” noted Gorka Muñoa from the UB’s Faculty of Biology and the UB Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio).
The authors defend that the goal of no more than 1.5°C global warming needs a complete halt to using new fossil fuel deposits, stopping the licensing of new fossil fuel extraction, and closing many oil, gas, and coal extraction projects currently in production or already developed.
The authors call for urgent action from governments, corporations, and large investors — such as pension funds — to immediately stop any investment in the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure if the correct socio-environmental criteria are not applied. “Massive investment in clean energy sources is needed to secure global energy demand, enact and support suspensions and bans on fossil fuel exploration and extraction, and adhere to the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty,” the team concludes.
Pellegrini, L., Arsel, M., Muñoa, G. et al. The atlas of unburnable oil for supply-side climate policies. Nat Commun 15, 2318 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46340-6
What kind of energy will be used to build a new, de-carbonised infrastructure if not fossil fuels?
Stop their exploitation prematurely and you’ll end up with nothing!
Promote inefficient, ressource heavy, diluted, mostly unavailable “renewables” will prevent to achieve any decarbonisation, with the dire result of poverty and more dependency from energy rich countries.