New PROTECT paper! Projected land ice contributions to twenty-first-century sea-level rise

PROTECT paper number 10 was published on 5 May in Nature by Tamsin Edwards et al.

Here are the main findings:

• Adaptation strategies should include a higher uncertainty factor until climate policies and the Antarctic’s response to climate change are better constrained and known

• Limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial values would halve the land ice contribution to sea level rise, compared to the current commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (Nationally Determined Contributions – 2016 Paris Agreement), from 25 to 13 cm.

• For the first time, ice sheets and mountain glaciers are taken into account in a coherent framework for the estimation of uncertainties, using a statistical emulator. Glaciers will probably be responsible for half of the sea-level rise resulting from the continental ice in the 21st century. 
• Antarctica’s mass loss could be 5 times greater than the most likely value and thus increase the contribution of continental ice to #sealevel to 42 cm, under the Paris Agreement. This risk could jeopardize flood mitigation and adaptation strategies along the coasts.