What Are Climate Targets?

Written By Teacher: Liz Ransom

As a High School Spanish teacher and student newspaper advisor, Liz has taught for over 20 years and has served as World Languages Department Chair and K-6 summer camp activities leader. She has worked in Ohio, Maine, New Jersey, Maryland, and Chile.

 Understanding climate targets can provide students with tangible goals to measure climate action and help them connect the dots between local and global initiatives. Students can evaluate and compare their own state’s climate targets using this climate policy tracker, or take a more global view by using this country tracker.  Motivated students can discover how youth climate activists are using the courts to hold governments accountable for making and meeting climate targets in this mock trial lesson, or learn how to influence policy themselves with this civics unit.

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

Targets are the limits that scientists and policymakers set in plans to combat climate change. These targets can take different forms, from goals for limiting the Earth’s warming to hard caps on greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the Paris Agreement set 2 ℃ as a temperature target for global warming, while the state of Massachusetts has a target to reduce emissions to 50% below 1990 levels by 2030.

Finding the right target

Setting targets is complicated. For economists, a target should be set at the point where the marginal benefit of a goal (like reducing warming) is equal to the marginal cost of achieving it (such as the costs of investing in new infrastructure or letting energy costs rise). In forming targets, economists use models that track the climate, the economy, and how they interact. Many of these models exist, including the EPPA model, which is run through the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. The models are used to find the ideal targets for temperature or greenhouse gas emissions. While these optimal levels do exist—there is a “right” target— they can be hard to find, given the number of factors at play. Because of this, models often provide a wide range of acceptable targets.