The slow pace of global climate ambition has left a huge gap between where the world needs to be in order to keep the hope of a 1.5°C world alive and where it is
That is only a modest improvement on where things stood when the Paris agreement was being negotiated in 2015. Under the deal that was struck at the time, governments offered up pledges to reduce their national emissions. Toiling away in the background, climate modellers estimated that the cumulative consequence of these pledges would be to bring about roughly 2.7°C of warming by 2100.
Hence the flurry of climate pledges that were made over the past year. They focus on what will be done by the end of the decade, by which time global greenhouse gas emissions must be roughly half what they were in 2010 in order to have a good chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C. So far, no country is on track to do this, says Niklas Höhne of NewClimate Institute, a think-tank.
At first glance this seems considerably more pessimistic than what the International Energy Agency , a think-tank that works for governments, said earlier: “26 climate pledges could help limit global warming to 1.8°C”. “BIG NEWS,” tweeted the agency’s director, Fatih Birol, “#26 climate pledges mean Glasgow is getting closer to Paris!”. In fact, the two numbers are entirely consistent with each other.
Yet for now, talk of net-zero is mostly just that: talk. China, for instance, has said it would ensure its emissions hit a peak before 2030 and reach net-zero by 2060 in spite of the fact that it still generates more than 60% of its electricity from coal. Many other countries have made similar net-zero promises with very little if any detail of how they plan to get there.UN
talks. These dealt with some headline issues, like curbing methane emissions, deforestation and phasing out coal use, but none were reached unanimously. More than 100 countries have so far signed up to cut their collective methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Another group agreed to quit using coal in two decades. Last week, a team of independent climate researchers found that pledges to cut methane could shave 0.
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