The deadline that the world’s governments had given themselves to achieve the Paris goals is about to end, and the planet is not on track to avoid climate disaster. The UN has just published the most comprehensive assessment of the efforts made collectively since the world’s countries signed the Paris Agreement in 2015. Eight years later, after speaking with governments, companies, farmers, NGOs, scientists and technicians, the conclusions could not be more disheartening.
Global emissions are not in line with the reduction models that allowed the objectives to be achieved. And not only that, the window of opportunity “is rapidly closing,” warns the report from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The report was going to be published next week, but was brought forward to Friday, as a culmination of the hottest summer ever recordedwith heat waves and extreme weather episodes from the fires in Canada and Hawaii, to the fires and DANAs in Greece and much of the Mediterranean, to the severe floods in China.
The UN has called on the 176 countries that signed the Paris Agreement to urgently cut emissions, stressing that the goal of keeping the rise in temperatures below 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial era requires “phasing out of all uncontrolled fossil fuels (without CO2 capture)”.
Governments needed to peak global greenhouse gas emissions in 2025, and then begin to reduce rapidly from there. However, emissions continue to increaseand there is a gap of 20.3 to 23.9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide between the cuts planned for 2030 and the current rate of gas emissions in the world.