A new United Nations report has found that the increasingly evident impacts of climate change will not be averted if the largest greenhouse gas emitters do not step up their efforts to reduce their environmental impact.
Ahead of the 27th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27), the world’s leading intergovernmental organization warned that current plans are vastly insufficient.
The downward trend in emissions expected by 2030 shows that nations have made some progress this year. But the science is clear… We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required.
The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) report found that current climate pledges would lead to surface temperatures climbing 2.5 °C above pre-industrial levels in the coming decades.
The 2.5 ºC increase would be one degree above the limits set by the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate, which set the goal of keeping global temperatures from exceeding 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels this century.
See Also:Poorest Countries Seek Debt Relief, Citing Costs of Climate ChangeRecent research found multiple climate tipping points would likely be triggered by 1.5 ºC of warming with devastating impacts on agriculture and biodiversity.
The researchers said that 2.5 ºC of warming would be even more consequential. They predicted that some areas of the planet would become virtually uninhabitable, agriculture would suffer from even more extreme heatwaves and wildfires, biodiversity loss on land and in the oceans would accelerate and large swaths of coastal areas would sink below the rising sea level.
The UNFCC said that, if enacted, current climate plans would result in an almost 11 percent increase in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, compared with 2010 levels. However, the organization added that this increase would be slightly below last year’s estimate of almost 14 percent, indicating some progress has been made.
In 2019, the researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote that emissions should be reduced by 43 percent by 2030 to avert further global warming.
“The downward trend in emissions expected by 2030 shows that nations have made some progress this year,” said Simon Stiell, the UNFCC executive secretary.
“But the science is clear, and so are our climate goals under the Paris Agreement,” he added. “We are still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions required to put us on track toward a 1.5 ºC world.”
According to Stiell, national governments need to strengthen their climate action plans now and implement them in the next eight years. However, not many countries seem keen to make the difficult decisions required to enact these plans.
According to the UNFCC, during COP26 in Glasgow, 193 nations said they would announce new climate plans. However, only 24 have submitted their updated plans to the U.N. climate unit.
“It’s disappointing,” Stiell said. “Government decisions and actions must reflect the level of urgency, the gravity of the threats we are facing, and the shortness of the time we have remaining to avoid the devastating consequences of runaway climate change.”
When it comes to long-term net-zero strategies, the UNFCC indicated that some progress had been made.
Sixty-two countries have net-zero plans in place. Combined, these countries are home to 47 percent of the global population, account for 83 percent of the Gross Domestic Product and are responsible for 69 percent of energy use.
The UNFCC said these plans are “a strong signal that the world is starting to aim for net-zero emissions.” Still, they warned that “many net-zero targets remain uncertain and postpone into the future critical action that needs to take place now.”
COP27 is scheduled to run from November 6th to November 18th in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. It will be the latest in a series of global climate-related meetings that started in 1992 in Brazil.
In the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, 197 nations pledged to support the creation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its U.N. Climate Change secretariat.
The treaty signed at the time aimed at stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere “to prevent dangerous interference from human activity on the climate system.”
The Conferences of Parties, or COPs, are meetings during which the participating nations define strategies to reach that goal.
“COP27 is the moment where global leaders can regain momentum on climate change, make the necessary pivot from negotiations to implementation and get moving on the massive transformation that must take place throughout all sectors of society to address the climate emergency,” Stiell said.
He urged national governments “to show at the conference how they will put the Paris Agreement to work through legislation, policies and programs, as well as how they will cooperate and provide support for implementation.”
He also called for nations to progress in four priority areas: mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage and finance.
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