The report labelled the difference between the emissions reductions needed to avoid dangerous climate change and those which countries have pledged to achieve as "alarmingly high".
The debates in the next few years will be stormy, and there is no guarantee that there will be an outcome that will produce the emissions reductions needed.
Scaling up renewable energy to 36% of the global energy mix by 2030 would provide about half of the emissions reductions needed to hold warming to 2C.
Others were less optimistic that a more comprehensive accounting of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions would make it easier to achieve the emissions reductions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
The UN environment programme warned earlier this month that industrialised countries were falling short of the emissions reductions needed to prevent warming of 2C above pre-industrial levels, the goal set by world leaders.
As 170 countries meet on Friday in New York to sign the Paris agreement and potentially set the world on a low-carbon development path from 2020, developing country negotiators called for a reality check, saying there was a vast financial gap between the world's climate change ambition and the reality of funding the emissions reductions needed to avoid catastrophic warming.
"The majority of the global emissions reductions needed to decarbonise the global economy can be achieved in ways that are nationally net-beneficial to countries, even leaving aside the 'climate benefits'," says Fergus Green in his paper for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at the LSE.
Only curbing energy use, perhaps through 'social efficiency' gains, particularly in the high-energy consumption countries, can provide the rapid emissions reductions needed.
In fact, if the world pursues a safer trajectory, urban leaders' decisions could influence up to 1/3 of the carbon emissions reductions needed over the next five years.
Alex Hall, one of the study's authors, told VICE News that while the emissions reductions needed to save California must stem from a global effort, the state could lead by example.
