Annual U.N. report on climate finds progress but says not nearly enough

The world’s nations are taking more concrete steps to tackle climate change than ever before, but they are still very far from making the sweeping changes needed to keep global temperatures at relatively safe levels, according to a United Nations report issued on Monday.

The annual assessment, known as the Emissions Gap Report, tracks the gulf between national ambitions to fight global warming and what scientists say is needed to stave off catastrophe. That gulf has shrunk slightly over the past year but it remains large.

At least 149 countries have updated their pledges under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to curb their greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, the report found. Nine countries did so this year, including Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Uruguay.

If every single country were to follow through on its stated plans (a big if ) then global greenhouse gas emissions would be 2% to 9% lower at the end of the decade than they are today.

But that would still put Earth on track to heat up roughly 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels by the century’s end, the report found. With every fraction of a degree of warming, the risks from deadly heat waves, wildfires, droughts, storms and species extinctions increase significantly, scientists have said.

Under the Paris Agreement, world leaders vowed to hold global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, and preferably closer to 1.5 degrees Celsius, in order to limit the risks from climate catastrophes.

Current policies don’t come close to meeting those goals, the report found. To stay below 2 degrees Celsius, global emissions would need to fall roughly 29% between now and 2030. To stay at 1.5 degrees, global emissions would need to fall about 43%.

“We are seeing countries make progress on implementing the climate plans they’ve already announced,” said Anne Olhoff, a climate policy expert based in Denmark and a co-author of the report. “But those plans are still far from sufficient for meeting the Paris Agreement goals.”