The world is not doing nearly enough — nor even promising to do enough — to reach any of the global goals limiting future warming, a United Nations report said.
This inaction means the window is closing, but not quite shut yet, on efforts to keep future warming to just a few more tenths of a degree from now, according to Thursday’s Emissions Gap report from the United Nations Environment Programme.
“Global and national climate commitments are falling pitifully short,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday. “We are headed for a global catastrophe.”
The world is weaning itself from fossil fuels too slowly, the report and experts said.
“The report confirms the utterly glacial pace of climate action, despite the looming precipice of climate tipping points we’re approaching,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, head of Climate Analytics, which also examines what countries are promising and doing about carbon emissions in its own analysis.
‘An action gap’
Instead of limiting warming to 1.5 or 2 C above pre-industrial levels, the global goals set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, current trends mean warming will hit 2.8 degrees by 2100, the UN report said. Countries’ concrete pledges would bring that down to 2.6 degrees.
The planet has already warmed 1.1 C since pre-industrial times.
“In all likelihood we will pass by 1.5,” UNEP executive director Inger Andersen told The Associated Press in an interview. She didn’t say when she thinks that would happen. “We can still do it, but that means 45 per cent emissions reductions” by 2030.
“It’s really about understanding that every little digit [tenth of a degree of warming] that we shave off is a lesser catastrophic outlook,” Andersen said.
The emissions gap is the difference between the amount of carbon pollution being spewed between now and 2030 and the lower levels needed to keep warming to 1.5 or 2 C.
Guterres said “the emissions gap is a by-product of a commitments gap. A promises gap. An action gap.”
‘Winning too slowly’
Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who chairs the independent Global Carbon Project, which tracks carbon dioxide emissions around the world but wasn’t part of the UN report, said “another decade of fossil emissions at current rates and we’ll zip past 1.5 C…. The way things are going, though, we’ll zip past 1.5 C, past 2 C and — heaven help us — even 2.5 or 3 C.”
“We’re failing by winning too slowly,” Jackson said in an email. “Renewables are booming and cheaper than ever. But COVID stimulus plans and the war in Ukraine have disrupted global energy markets and led some countries [to] revert to coal and other fuels. This can’t continue in a safe climate.”
In 10 days, yearly international climate negotiations will begin in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, and in the run-up to the United Nations conference, several reports highlight different aspects of the world’s battle to curb climate change.
An alarming new report in the medical journal The Lancet calls climate change the greatest global threat to human health and highlights how it’s much more than an environmental issue.
The G20 nations, the richest countries, are responsible for 75 per cent of the heat-trapping pollution, Andersen said, adding “clearly, the more those G20s lean in, the better we will be.”
The latest UN report said “G20 members are far behind in delivering” on their promises to reduce emissions.
Taking out Turkey and Russia, current policies by G20 nations fall 2.6 billion tonnes a year short of the 2030 goal, the report said. Both Turkey and Russia’s targets for 2030 have higher pollution levels than current policies project, and using their projections would make the G20 emissions gap artificially low, the report said.
“It’s critical that China, as well as the U.S. and other G20 countries, actually lead,” Andersen said. She hailed the newly passed $375-billion US climate- and inflation-fighting law in the United States as an example of action instead of just promises.
The report said that by 2030 the U.S. law should prevent one billion tonnes of carbon emissions, which is much more than other nations’ efforts made this year.
“What we’re calling for is an accelerated pace, because there are good things happening out there in a number of countries, but it’s just not fast enough and it’s not consistent enough,” Andersen said.
