World Failing to Meet Emissions Reductions Pledged in Paris Agreement

Global pledges for reduc­ing green­house gas emis­sions are not enough to cur­tail global warm­ing, accord­ing to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The United in Science 2021 report warned that each of the next five years will present tem­per­a­tures at least 1 ºC higher than pre-indus­trial lev­els.

Compared to the aver­age tem­per­a­tures of the period from 1850 to 1900, from 2022 onwards the world will see a tem­per­a­ture rise by 0.9 °C to 1.8 °C. By 2030, that increase could go up even fur­ther.

“There is a 40 per­cent chance that the aver­age tem­per­a­ture in one of the next five years will be at least 1.5 °C warmer than pre-indus­trial lev­els,” warned the report. ​“However, it is very unlikely that the five-year aver­age tem­per­a­ture for 2021 to 2025 will pass the 1.5 °C thresh­olds.”

The pro­jec­tions are based on a wide array of sources, one of which is the green­house gas emis­sions data com­ing from the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), which paints a quickly wors­en­ing global sce­nario.

UNEP has esti­mated that five years after the Paris Agreement the so-called emis­sion gap is as large as ever. The emis­sion gap is the dif­fer­ence between how much the sci­en­tists had asked for global emis­sions to be reduced by 2030 and where they actu­ally are head­ing.

“Last year, we esti­mated that there was a 5.6 per­cent drop in emis­sions and since the life­time of car­bon diox­ide is so long, this one-year anom­aly in emis­sions does­n’t change the big pic­ture,” Petteri Taalas, sec­re­tary-gen­eral of the WMO, said in ref­er­ence to the effects of the Covid-19 pan­demic in 2020.

“We saw some improve­ments in air qual­ity,” he added. ​“We saw pos­i­tive evo­lu­tion there. But now we have returned more or less back to the 2019 emis­sion lev­els.”

The Paris Agreement asks for coun­tries to lay out national strate­gic plans aimed at lim­it­ing emis­sions and fore­cast­ing their future bal­ance.

The sig­na­tory nations agreed to try to pre­vent tem­per­a­tures from exceed­ing 2 ºC above pre-indus­trial lev­els, with a spe­cial effort on try­ing to keep them under 1.5 ºC. Of the 191 coun­tries that have signed the agree­ment, only 113 have pre­sented their national plans.

According to the WMO report, given the pledges and the emis­sion strate­gies already rolled out or announced, global emis­sions are set to rise 16 per­cent by 2030, well above the 45 per­cent drop that U.N. sci­en­tists see as the only way to meet Paris Agreement expec­ta­tions.

“We are not yet on track towards the Paris 1.5 to 2 degrees’ limit, although pos­i­tive things have started to hap­pen and the polit­i­cal inter­est to mit­i­gate cli­mate change is clearly grow­ing,” Taalas added. ​“But to be suc­cess­ful in this effort, we have to start act­ing now. We can­not wait for decades to act, we have to start act­ing already in this decade.”

According to the U.N. analy­sis, a 16 per­cent rise might lead to a global tem­per­a­ture increase of up to 2.7 ºC, far exceed­ing the Paris Agreement tar­get.

“A 16 per­cent increase is a huge cause for con­cern,” Patricia Espinosa, the U.N.‘s chief cli­mate nego­tia­tor, told the BBC.

“It is in sharp con­trast with the calls by sci­ence for rapid, sus­tained and large-scale emis­sion reduc­tions to pre­vent the most severe cli­mate con­se­quences and suf­fer­ing, espe­cially of the most vul­ner­a­ble, through­out the world,” she added.

According to a World Resources Institute and Climate Analytics report cited by the BBC, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India and China are respon­si­ble for 33 per­cent of all green­house gas emis­sions, but none of them have yet pre­sented their own strate­gic plan. Other coun­tries, such as Mexico, Brazil and Russia, have warned that their emis­sions will keep grow­ing.

While many indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries pre­pare for the COP26 inter­na­tional cli­mate meet­ing to be held in Glasgow start­ing October 31, other nations are start­ing to ana­lyze the costs both from acti­vat­ing their own strate­gic plans and from the con­se­quences of global warm­ing itself.

A report from the Kenyan think­tank Power Shift Africa warned African gov­ern­ments strug­gling to recover from the effects of the Covid-19 pan­demic that ​“a nar­row focus on an eco­nomic recov­ery that ignores cli­mate change and the broader objec­tives of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment will cost Africa more eco­nomic pain in the long run.”

According to Power Shift Africa, cli­mate change should be put at the heart of the eco­nomic recov­ery plans through­out the con­ti­nent.

“Driving a Green and Sustainable post-Covid-19 Recovery in Africa” acknowl­edges the ongo­ing efforts of a few coun­tries, such as Nigeria, where five mil­lion off-grid home solar sys­tems will be installed.

“The pan­demic is a reset moment, to shift away from bil­lions of invest­ments in doomed fos­sil fuels,” Mohamed Adow, direc­tor of Power Shift Africa, told AFP. ​“Africa is blessed with sun and wind, it must be the bedrock of our recov­ery.”

According to Adow, wealth­ier coun­tries should stick to their pledges and give cli­mate-vul­ner­a­ble nations the promised $100 bil­lion, which is needed to cut emis­sions and offer new paths to devel­op­ment.

“We need to build global sol­i­dar­ity,” he said. ​“In the pan­demic as in the cli­mate emer­gency, no one is safe until every­one is safe.”

• United Nations
• BBC News
• AFP