November 20, 2024

Short Lived Climate Pollutants: A Massive and Neglected Opportunity

Mitigation of short-lived climate pollutants (“SLCPs”) is important and underfunded. Corporate decarbonization efforts should include and prioritize SLCP mitigation, including through carbon credit purchases. These “emergency brake” solutions will help avoid irreversible climate tipping points and feedback loops, which would otherwise lead to catastrophic impact.

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on how refrigerant end-of-life management fits into the larger global context of climate action. Part 1 lays out the case for why action on short-lived climate pollutants is so critical in the next 10-15 years. Part 2 will go deeper into refrigerants and describe how Recoolit’s efforts today support a transition to the net-zero cooling economy of tomorrow. Part 3 will make a case for how refrigerants and other SLCPs should fit into a portfolio of different approaches on climate action.

The next 20 years are critical

The next two decades represent a crucial window for climate action. We face urgent risks from near-term warming that could trigger irreversible changes in Earth's systems. Scientists have identified several critical tipping points—from the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet to the degradation of the Amazon rainforest—that could be crossed with just a few tenths of a degree of additional warming. Research suggests that some of these tipping points, once thought to lie far in the future, may be approaching faster than previously expected. The most recent IPCC assessment indicates that several tipping points could be triggered between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming, temperatures we could reach within the next 20-30 years under current trajectories.

These tipping points don't exist in isolation—they form part of an interconnected system where crossing one threshold can accelerate others, creating cascading effects. For instance, Arctic permafrost thaw releases methane, which causes more warming, which leads to more thaw in a dangerous feedback loop. Similarly, the loss of Arctic sea ice reduces the Earth's ability to reflect sunlight, amplifying regional and global warming. This means that warming in the next two decades could lock in centuries or millennia of additional climate change, even if we later succeed in reducing atmospheric CO2 levels.

This reality underscores why we need aggressive SLCP reductions to slow near-term warming and buy crucial time, while simultaneously scaling up longer-term decarbonization and carbon removal initiatives to address the long-term challenge.

SLCPs contribute meaningfully to warming

Most discussion of climate change focuses on carbon dioxide (CO2). However, other climate pollutants, especially Short-Lived Climate Pollutants (SLCPs), are underappreciated and must also be a part of the solution. SLCPs, such as methane, HFC refrigerants, black carbon, carbon monoxide, and aviation contrails, account for nearly half of industrial-era global heating. And each pound of SLCP emissions contributes much more to warming than a pound of CO2: from 80x the impact for methane up to a 4000x multiplier for some HFCs!

‍

Unlike CO2, which remains in the atmosphere as a long-lived greenhouse gas for hundreds to thousands of years, SLCPs have much shorter atmospheric lifetimes on the scale of years to days. Cutting the rate of SLCP emissions — even if gross SLCP emissions do not reach zero — can therefore rapidly reduce the rate of atmospheric warming.

The good news: rapid SCLP mitigation is feasible.

Scaling up SLCP reductions using existing technologies today can avoid up to 0.6° C by 2050: four times more in that time period than CO2 cuts alone. These short-term cuts are our best chance to reduce the risk of hitting near-term tipping points which could create vicious climate feedback loops. These reductions can also annually avoid millions of air pollution deaths and crop loss tonnes. In short, global climate goals can only be met with swift and decisive action on both long-lived and short-lived pollutants.

The good news is that SLCP abatement includes a large number of “low-hanging fruits” that are technologically ready and affordable to deploy today. These solutions include improved refrigerant management and deployment of low-GWP refrigerants, methane management in fossil fuel production, livestock methane management, reduced methane emissions from water-efficient rice cultivation, soot-free transport and cooking solutions, reduced food waste, and more. These solutions are easier to deploy and cheaper than many other worthwhile interventions of similar magnitude.

Project Drawdown refers to these as “emergency brake” solutions: cutting these emissions now buys us time to decarbonize other sectors and scale up carbon removals.

How to take action on SLCPs

Companies and others can take action on SLCPs in two ways: by reducing their own emissions of SLCPs or by funding SLCP mitigation efforts outside their emissions boundary.

Opportunities within the boundary are largely industry-dependent and a full list of opportunities is outside our scope here. Unlike CO2 abatement, where electrifying transportation and energy use are economy-wide opportunities, the biggest wins for SLCP emissions will be different for each company: methane will be significant for agriculture and fossil fuel producers whereas HFC abatement will be most critical for industries with heavy cooling use such as data centers, commercial real estate, and food/beverage.

By contrast, making SLCP-focused climate contributions outside an institution’s emissions boundary are somewhat simpler. A variety of NGOs – IGSD, EIA, and NDRC among others – are focused on advancing national and international policy reforms to restrict SLCP emissions. For those companies purchasing carbon credits, SLCP abatement credits tend to be particularly high-integrity, as evidenced by the recent selection of several SLCP methodologies to receive the coveted Core Carbon Principles label as “high-integrity”.

Conclusion

We are closer than ever before to entering catastrophic and irreversible feedback loops in the climate system. Our best near-term opportunity to mitigate warming is to focus on short-lived climate pollutants, where there are a number of low-hanging fruit. Companies can incorporate this into their climate plans directly, through Scope 1 decarbonization, or by supporting NGOs and carbon credit projects that emphasize these efforts.

‍

To learn more about Recoolit’s work on refrigerants, feel free to email us: hello@recoolit.com. And stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 of this series, where we’ll continue making the case for why refrigerants are such a critical and tractable effort in the climate fight.