AbstractSubnational entities are recognizing the need to systematically examine options for reducing their carbon footprints. However, few robust and comprehensive analyses are available that lay out how US states and regions can most effectively contribute. This paper describes an approach developed for Georgia—a state in the southeastern United States called "Drawdown Georgia", our research involves (1) understanding Georgia's baseline carbon footprint and trends, (2) identifying the universe of Georgia-specific carbon-reduction solutions that could be impactful by 2030, (3) estimating the greenhouse gas reduction potential of these high-impact 2030 solutions for Georgia, and (4) estimating associated costs and benefits while also considering how the solutions might impact societal priorities, such as economic development opportunities, public health, environmental benefits, and equity. We began by examining the global solutions identified by Project Drawdown. The resulting 20 high-impact 2030 solutions provide a strategy for reducing Georgia's carbon footprint in the next decade using market-ready technologies and practices and including negative emission solutions. This paper describes our systematic and replicable process and ends with a discussion of its strengths, weaknesses, and planned future research.
Modes of climate variability affect global and regional climates on different spatio-temporal scales, and they have important impacts on human activities and ecosystems. As these modes are a useful tool for simplifying the understanding of the climate system, it is crucial that we gain improved knowledge of their long-term past evolution and interactions over time to contextualise their present and future behaviour. We review the literature focused on proxy-based reconstructions of modes of climate variability during the Holocene (i.e., the last 11.7 thousand years) with a special emphasis on i) proxy-based reconstruction methods; ii) available proxy-based reconstructions of the main modes of variability, i.e., El Niño Southern Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Variability, Atlantic Multidecadal Variability, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Southern Annular Mode and the Indian Ocean Dipole; iii) major interactions between these modes; and iv) external forcing mechanisms related to the evolution of these modes. This review shows that modes of variability can be reconstructed using proxy-based records from a wide range of natural archives, but these reconstructions are scarce beyond the last millennium, partly due to the lack of robust chronologies with reduced dating uncertainties, technical issues related to proxy calibration, and difficulty elucidating their stationary impact (or not) on regional climates over time. While for each mode the available reconstructions tend to agree at mutidecadal timescales, they show notable disagreement on shorter timescales beyond the instrumental period. The reviewed evidence suggests that the intrinsic variability of modes can be modulated by external forcing, such as orbital, solar, volcanic, and anthropogenic forcing. The review also highlights some modes experience higher variability over the instrumental period, which is partly ascribed to anthropogenic forcing. These features stress the paramount importance of further studying their past variations using long climate-proxy records for the progress of climate science. ; A.H. is supported by a Beatriu de Pinós –Marie Curie Cofund programme fellowship (2016 BP 00023) and HOLMODRIVE - North Atlantic Atmospheric Patterns influence on Western Iberia Climate: From the Lateglacial to the Present (PTDC/CTA-GEO/29029/2017) project funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal (FCT). A.H., S.G., and S.P-R. thank the Spanish research project PaleoModes (CGL2016-75281-C2-1-R) which provided some of their financial support. E.M.-C. contribution was funded by the project PARAMOUR (30454083) from the EOS program by the F.R.SFNRS. CM-P is supported by the Royal Society (ref: DH150185). P.O. contribution has been supported by the Ramon y Cajal senior tenure programme from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. L.C-B. acknowledges support from the ERC-funded project GC2.0 (Global Change 2.0: Unlocking the past for a clearer future, grant number 694481). The Spanish PTI PolarCSIC ( https://www.polarcsic.es ) is also acknowledged for providing partial financial support to S.G. R.M. was partially supported by the Swedish Research Council (grant DNR2013-8421). A. P.'s work was supported by a Science Foundation Ireland Career Development Award (17/CDA/4695), a research centre award (12/RC/2289_P2), an investigator award (16/IA/4520), and a Marine Research Programme funded by the Irish Government, cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (Grant-Aid Agreement No. PBA/CC/18/01). A.A.S. was supported by the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and Defra. J.S. is supported by the strategic research program of Modelling the Regional and Global Earth system (MERGE) hosted by the Faculty of Science at Lund University. D.S. is supported by Blue-Action (European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Grant Number: 727852) and EUCP (European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no 776613) projects as well as by the French national program LEFE/INSU with VADEMECUM project. G. X. thanks the funding from the Chinese Scholarship Council (201704910171). This study is partly based on discussions held during the joint workshop of the CLIMOVAR group and IBCC-lo2k project, Barcelona, 25–27 September 2013. PAGES and IBCC-lo2k are thanked for supporting this workshop. Finally, we also thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)
