Global warming to exceed Paris target despite climate pledges, but growth slows | Climate news

The combined climate pledges of countries around the world have targeted dangerous warming of 2.5 degrees Celsius, far higher than the limit countries committed to in Glasgow at COP26 last year.

That’s the verdict of a major United Nations (UN) assessment of how the political pledges of the 193 countries that signed the historic Paris Agreement stack up.

He warns that the world is heading for 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming, assuming all the plans are actually implemented.

It shows progress since the landmark Paris climate agreement in 2015, when the world was on track to warm by around 4C.

But it is still well above the currently agreed limit of 1.5C that the world must meet to avoid the worst effects of climate change, including severe floods and droughts, crop failures, the spread of disease and the loss of people and livelihoods. .

“To put it bluntly,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Steele, “countries’ current climate action plans are ‘simply not good enough.’

However, an annual synthesis of the plans says they are at least beginning to bend the global greenhouse gas emissions curve downward.

For the first time, the annual report predicts that emissions will peak in 2030. Last year, they should still continue to grow after 2030.

But emissions are still not “showing the rapid downward trend that science believes is necessary this decade,” the report said, because the sooner emissions decline, the less global warming will be recorded in the long term.

Read more: Everything you need to know about the UN climate talks in Egypt

The leading international climate group, the IPCC, says emissions need to be cut by 45% by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5C.

Climate plans are “not yet close” to the scale and speed needed to keep the world within safe limits, Mr Steele added, presenting the report on Wednesday morning.

A pledge to review and strengthen climate plans was recognized as a key success COP26 in Glasgow last year.

Mr Steil called it “disappointing” that only 24 had materialized over the past year, when many countries were preoccupied with the war in Ukraine and subsequent energy and food crises.

Alok Sharma, Member of Parliament and president of COP26, said the report showed that “while we have made some progress – and every fraction of a degree counts – much more is urgently needed”.

In two weeks, Britain will pass the baton to Egypt for the presidency COP27UN climate summit to be held in November.

The new climate plans that countries developed after COP26 aim to cut about 6 gigatonnes of global emissions in 2030, roughly equivalent to the current annual emissions of the US.

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