Chasing the climate change bus
Humanity is falling further behind in the race against climate change, with the gap between greenhouse gas emissions and levels needed to achieve the Paris climate treaty temperature goals continuing to widen, the UN has warned.
With only a single degree Celsius of warming so far, the world has seen a crescendo of deadly wildfires, heatwaves and hurricanes.
On current trends, temperatures are on track to rise roughly 4°C by the century’s end, a scenario that would tear at the fabric of civilisation, scientists say.
To cap global warming at 2°C, national carbon-cutting pledges annexed to the 2015 Paris Agreement must collectively triple by 2030, according to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Emissions Gap report.
To hold the rise in the Earth’s temperature to 1.5°C above the preindustrial benchmark, such efforts would have to increase fivefold.
“The emissions gap is much bigger than last year,” UNEP’s Philip Drost, one of several coordinators for the annual report’s ninth edition, said.
One obvious reason was a spike last year in the quantity of carbon dioxide, methane and other planet-warming gases escaping into the atmosphere.
This trend is set to continue in 2018, which saw a jump in CO² emissions from the energy sector, according to the International Energy Agency, as well as an increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO².
But the gap between where we are and where we need to be also grew on paper: new calculations by the UN’s top science panel sharply reduce the real-world potential for drawing CO² out of the air, whether by planting more trees or capturing and storing CO² emitted by power plants.
More broadly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report released last month concluded that 2°C of warming – once seen as a safety guardrail – would in fact usher in a maelstrom of deadly extreme weather.
Taken together, rising emissions and revised projections on CO² removal have widened the emissions gap by 15% for a 2°C world, and by nearly 70% for the 1.5°C target, according to the new report.
The news comes despite breakneck growth in solar and wind power, gains in energy efficiency, and climate action by business and local governments, said Andrew Steer, president and CEO of the Washington DC-based World Resources Institute.
“We are chasing a bus” – climate change – “and we are going faster and faster, setting new world records,” he said. Momentum is most lacking at national level, the report says.
“Governments really need to look at their Nationally Determined Contributions [NDCs] and increase their ambition,” said Drost.
Boosting carbon-cutting efforts is high on the agenda at UN climate talks starting next week in Katowice, though host country Poland has let it be known its top priority is finalising the “rulebook” for the Paris Agreement, which enters into force in 2020. But upping ambition will be a tall order given that most major economies are not even on track to achieve their current pledges.
The US, the world’s second biggest carbon emitter, will miss its targets, as will Australia, Canada and South Korea, the UN report said. The EU and SA will also fall short.
Top emitters China and Russia are both on track, but mostly because their goals were so modest to begin with, as with Brazil, Japan and Turkey. It is uncertain whether Indonesia and Mexico will hit their target.