UN warns world is facing ‘climate catastrophe’
THE world is on track for “climate catastrophe”, the United Nations warned, as it published a report showing that countries’ plans to cut emissions still fall far short of curbing dangerous warming.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said, even with new and updated plans and pledges from countries for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, the world faces global warming of 2.7C by 2100.
The latest climate plans and pledges to tackle emissions by 2030 only reduce predicted planet-warming pollution by 7.5% by 2030 compared to their previous commitments, it said, but reductions of 55% are needed to meet the goal to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C – beyond which more severe impacts of climate change will be felt, from extreme weather to rising seas.
A total of 49 countries and the European Union have pledged longterm targets to cut emissions to net zero, which could bring temperature rises down to 2.2C, but only if they are fully implemented, with action in the next decade, it said.
The report showed that just a fifth of the recovery investment to help reboot economies after the pandemic had gone to supporting green measures – missing an opportunity to drive action to slash emissions. It also highlighted opportunities to cut emissions quickly, including by tackling the powerful but short-lived greenhouse gas methane, which could be reduced significantly with technology and changes to diet.
Launching the report before world leaders head to Glasgow this week for crucial Cop26 climate talks, UNEP’s executive director Inger Andersen warned: “The world has to wake up to the imminent peril we face as a species. Climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a now problem.”
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said that, less than a week before the talks, “we are still on track for climate catastrophe”, warning there was a gap in leadership on tackling the crisis.
It is the latest warning over the climate crisis, as emissions of the gases that drive global warming are set to bounce back after the pandemic, and reached record concentrations in the atmosphere in 2020.
Countries at Cop26 are under pressure to deliver on promises made in the global Paris Agreement to hold global temperature rises to “well below” 2C and to try to keep warming to 1.5C, to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, but the national plans countries previously put forward for the Paris deal left the world well off-track for the 1.5C and 2C limits, so they have had to submit new or updated plans for action up to 2030, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), by Cop26.
The latest annual analysis of the “emissions gap”, between the action countries are planning and what is needed by 2030, shows that, even with new or updated plans from 120 countries and the EU, as well as new pledges from key polluters such as China, far more needs to be done.
It finds the impact of the new and updated plans will reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by just 2.9 billion tonnes in 2030 compared to the old NDCs.
Emissions need to be reduced by another 28 billion tonnes in 2030 to keep the world on a path to keeping temperature rises to 1.5C.