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All nations of the world had homework this year: submit new-and-improved plans to fight climate change. But the plans they handed in “have barely moved the needle” on reducing Earth’s future warming, a new United Nations report finds.
And a good chunk of that progress is counteracted by the United States’ withdrawal from the effort, the report adds.
The newest climate-fighting plans – mandated every five years by the 2015 Paris Agreement – shaves about three-tenths of a degree Celsius (nearly six-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) off a warming future compared with the projections a year ago.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s policies, which range from rolling back environmental regulations to hindering green energy projects, will add back a tenth of a degree of warming, the UN Environment Program’s Emissions Gap report said Tuesday.
“Every tenth of a degree has ramifications on communities, on ecosystems around the world. It is particularly important for those vulnerable communities and ecosystems that are already being impacted,” said Adelle Thomas, vice chair of a separate UN scientific panel that calculates climate impacts.
“It matters in heat waves. It matters in ocean heat waves and the destruction of coral reefs. It matters long-term when we think about sea level rise,” Thomas said.
Global average temperature increase is mainly caused by the release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which happens when fuels like oil, gas and coal are burned. So the plans that countries turn in must detail how, and how fast, they will cut emissions of such gases.
Within the next decade, Earth is likely to blow past 1.5⁰ Celsius (2.7⁰ Farenheit) since the mid-1800s, which is the internationally agreed-upon goal made in Paris. If nations do as they promise in their plans, the planet will warm 2.3⁰C to 2.5⁰C (4.1⁰F to 4.5⁰F), the report calculates.
Current policies put the world on path for 2.8⁰C (5⁰F) of warming, providing context for upcoming UN climate talks in Belem, Brazil.
Even superfast and deep cuts in emissions from coal, oil and natural gas will still more than likely mean global temperatures go up at least 1.7⁰C (3.1⁰F) this century with efforts then to bring them back down, the report says.
Ten years ago, before the Paris Agreement, the world was on a path to be about 4⁰C (7.2⁰F) warmer.
“We are making progress,’’ UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen told The Associated Press. “We have to go faster.”
The United States – which submitted a climate-fighting plan in 2024 from the Biden administration but now will exit the Paris agreement in two months – changes the future outlook significantly. Until the Trump administration decided to get out of the climate-fighting effort, the US plan was promising some of the most significant cuts in future emissions, the report said.
UNEP said the US did not provide comments on the report by their deadline and asked for emissions data about the US to be removed. The UNEP declined but included a footnote at the US request, saying that it doesn’t support the report.
Now the U.N. is calculating that the rest of world must cut an additional two billion tons a year of carbon dioxide to make up for what the report projects is growing American carbon pollution. Last year, the world pumped 57.7 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the air and needs to get down to about 33 billion tons a year to have a chance of limiting warming to near the goal, the report said.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare, who helps run a separate emissions and temperature projecting report called Climate Action Tracker, said that his calculations show the same as the report.
The numbers indicate “a lack of political will,” he said.
LESS TALK, MORE ACTION
Meanwhile, on eve of UN climate talks in Brazil, there are calls for less talk and more action.
For 30 years, world leaders and diplomats have gathered at United Nations negotiating sessions to try to curb climate change, but Earth’s temperature continues to rise and extreme weather worsens.
Past pledges from nearly 200 nations have fallen far short and new plans submitted this year barely speed up pollution-fighting efforts, experts say. And if the numbers aren’t sobering enough for world leaders when they kick off the action Thursday, there’s the setting: Belem, a relatively poor city on the edge of a weakened Amazon.
Unlike past climate negotiations – and especially the one 10 years ago that forged the landmark Paris climate agreement – this annual UN conference isn’t primarily aimed at producing a grand deal or statement over its two weeks. Organizers and analysts frame this Conference of Parties – known less formally as COP30 – as the “implementation COP”.
“This is really going to be much more about what are we doing on the ground,” said former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, who helped shepherd the 2015 Paris agreement aimed at limiting warming.
Figueres and many of more than three dozen experts interviewed by The Associated Press said negotiators have already pinned down the goal. What’s needed now is more money and political will for countries to put decades of words and promises into action and policy to reduce heat-trapping gases and stop deforestation. Only that will put the brakes on global warming as it careens toward a level the world has agreed is too dangerous, they say.
In Belem, diplomats, activists, scientists and business leaders will discuss new national climate-fighting plans, the need to save trees that absorb carbon pollution, how communities can adapt to warming and how to financially help developing nations hit hardest by climate change.
Host Brazil will preside and set the agenda. For the talks to be a success, world leaders need to beef up efforts and money for adapting to climate change and fund billion-dollar efforts to prevent deforestation and land degradation, said Suely Vaz, who used to run Brazil’s environment agency.
Those leaders arrive Thursday for a two-day pre-meeting summit to discuss ratcheting up the fight against climate change.
AP
English (US) ·