Aligning climate scenarios to emissions inventories shifts global benchmarks.

Taking stock of global progress towards achieving the Paris Agreement requires consistently measuring aggregate national actions and pledges against modelled mitigation pathways. However, national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs) and scientific assessments of anthropogenic emissions follow different accounting conventions for land-based carbon fluxes resulting in a large difference in the present emission estimates, a gap that will evolve over time. Using state-of-the-art methodologies and a land carbon-cycle emulator, we align the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-assessed mitigation pathways with the NGHGIs to make a comparison.

A stakeholders' pathway towards a future land use and food system in Germany.

Food systems contribute considerably to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and influence land use. In Germany, many strategies have been proposed by policy-makers to reduce negative impacts and make the food system more sustainable. It is unclear how close the suggested policies, when bundled, will bring the food and land use system towards the targeted goals; and what stakeholders from non-policy-making organizations consider realistic changes in the German food system.