Emissions pledges not being met, UN report finds
On the eve of the most important global climate meeting in years, a definitive United Nations report has found that the world is well off course on its promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions – and may have even farther to go than previously thought.
Seven major countries, including the United States, are well behind achieving the pledges they made in Paris just three years ago, the report finds, with little time left to adopt much more ambitious policy measures to curb their emissions.
‘‘We have new evidence that countries are not doing enough,’’ said Philip Drost, head of the steering committee for the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) annual ‘‘emissions gap’’ report, released in Paris yesterday.
That verdict is likely to weigh heavily during a UN climate meeting that begins in Poland next week.
The UNEP report finds that, with global emissions still increasing as of 2017, it’s unlikely they will reach a peak by 2020. Yet such a peak, required before any decline can occur, is a nearmandatory outcome if the world is to have a chance of achieving the Paris agreement’s most important goal: limiting the planet’s warming to ‘‘well below’’ 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.
Moreover, the report finds that the gap between countries’ Paris promises and emissions levels that would be needed to stay consistent with the agreement is even larger than previously believed.
Current global emissions were 53.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2017. If all countries live up to all promises made in Paris, they would also be about 53b tonnes in 2030. Emissions are projected to grow with the growth of populations and economies. This sets the world on a path to about 3C of total warming by 2100.
Emissions can only be about 40b tonnes annually in 2030 to preserve good odds of holding warming to 2C, the UNEP report finds. For 1.5C, they would have to fall to just 24b tonnes.
Current actions by major emitting countries – all of whom agreed in 2015 to be part of the Paris climate agreement, though the US is now backtracking – aren’t nearly enough to prevent another half-degree or more of warming, the report finds.
‘‘We need three times more ambition to close the two-degree gap, and five times more ambition to close the 1.5-degree gap,’’ said Drost.
Last month, scientists who are part of the UN’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that global emissions must be sharply cut by 2030 to preserve a chance of limiting temperatures to a rise of 1.5C.
Seven Paris accord countries – Argentina, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and the US – are off track to meet their promises for 2030, the UNEP report finds. So is the entire European Union.
Russia, India and Turkey are already on course to exceed their Paris promises by a good measure, but the report questions whether this may in part because they have aimed their ambitions too low.