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AbstractRapid coal phaseout is a key measure to reach the 1.5 °C warming target. With projected global coal demand declining faster than global supply, a poorly anticipated and planned transition in coal producing countries would have huge local and national economic and social impacts. Identifying the vulnerabilities of specific coal producing countries and regions to this transition is important for designing appropriate policies to manage its potential local and national impacts. For this purpose, the novel Coal Transitions Vulnerability Index (COTRAVI) is developed, composed by 12 key "transition risk" and "ability to cope" indicators, for the 10 largest coal producing countries. In addition to indicators included in previous transition risks analyses such as energy and economic dependency, coal reserves, and age of coal assets, the COTRAVI includes indicators to account for the likely speed of the transition (based on simulations from the COALMOD World model), the exposure and resilience of coal producing regions, the national economic resilience, and the transition policies in place. This provides a more holistic approach to identifying and comparing the challenges of producing countries. The results show the high importance of Just Transition plans in increasing the ability to cope with the transition, as well as the need for more structural changes and targeted policy efforts in highly vulnerable countries and heavily coal-dependent regions. The COTRAVI analysis also identifies two relevant roadblocks for a globally just coal transition: high cost of capital and stranded assets risk in the coal producing countries.

Current global mitigation ambition up to 2030 under the Paris Agreement, reflected in the National Determined Contributions (NDCs), is insufficient to achieve the agreement's 1.5 °C long-term temperature limit. As governments are preparing new and updated NDCs for 2020, the question as to how much collective improvement is achieved is a pivotal one for the credibility of the international climate regime. The recent Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assessed a wide range of scenarios that achieve the 1.5 °C limit. Those pathways are characterised by a substantial increase in near-term action and total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels about 50 % lower than what is implied by current NDCs. Here we assess the outcomes of different scenarios of NDC updating that fall short of achieving this 1.5 °C benchmark. We find that incremental improvements in reduction targets, even if achieved globally, are insufficient to align collective ambition with the goals of the Paris Agreement. We provide estimates for global mean temperature increase by 2100 for different incremental NDC update scenarios and illustrate climate impacts under those median scenarios for extreme temperature, long-term sea-level rise and economic damages for the most vulnerable countries. Under the assumption of maintaining ambition as reflected in current NDCs up to 2100 and beyond, we project a reduction in the gross domestic product (GDP) in tropical countries of around 60 % compared to a no-climate-change scenario and median long-term sea-level rise of close to 2 m in 2300. About half of these impacts can be avoided by limiting warming to 1.5 °C or below. Scenarios of more incremental NDC improvements do not lead to comparable reductions in climate impacts. An increase in aggregated NDC ambition of big emitters by 33 % in 2030 does not reduce presented climate impacts by more than about half compared to limiting warming to 1.5 °C. Our results underscore that a transformational increase ...