The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) announced on Tuesday (4 November) that the Earth will exceed the critical warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels within the next 10 years.
To stay below this threshold, the world will need to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared to 2019 levels by 2035. But there is little or no chance of that happening, given the inadequacy of countries’ measures to date, the 2025 Emissions Gap report says.
“Given the scale of the reductions needed, the short timeframe for realization, and the difficult political climate, it is very likely that we will exceed 1.5°C within the next decade,” UNEP representatives said in the report.
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In the Paris Agreement a decade ago, countries agreed to keep temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and work to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). These goals are based on scientific assessments of how gradual warming will worsen climate-related phenomena such as wildfires, droughts, and heat waves.
Humans can cope with the effects of 1.5 degrees of warming, but anything above that is dangerous, especially for people living in economically developing countries and island nations, Kirsten Zickfeld, a professor of climate science at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, previously told Live Science.
Compared to 1.5°C, warming of 2°C could more than double the proportion of the world’s population exposed to extreme heat. A summer without sea ice in the Arctic is predicted to occur once every 100 years at temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius, but at 2 degrees Celsius it will only occur once every 10 years. Coral reefs will also deteriorate by up to 29%, and 38% more permafrost will thaw at 2°C compared to 1.5°C.
UNEP representatives said in a new report that countries need to reduce emissions by 35% compared to 2019 levels by 2035 to stay below the 2°C threshold. However, the report says the pledges each country has made so far would commit the world to a much higher 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Celsius) of warming.
UNEP has warned that the world could warm by 2.8 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Celsius) by 2100 if business continues as usual.
Nevertheless, the outlook is slightly more positive than last year’s Emissions Gap report, which showed the world could warm by 3.1°C (5.6°F) unless countries make more ambitious commitments. But the 0.3C (0.5C) reduction in warming projected in the 2025 report remains unpromising. That’s because better methodologies account for 0.1 degrees (0.2 degrees) of improvement, and the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord could erase even that modest victory, the report says.
This year’s new pledges by countries such as China “remain largely unchanged,” the report said. “Countries are still far from achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
UNEP’s report was released just days before the start of the UN’s COP30 climate change summit in Brazil. “We want a serious response and we want what we decide to be implemented,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told Reuters.
Brazil will visit countries and propose the creation of a new Global Environment Council with the mandate to track progress against climate pledges, Reuters reported. “If we don’t, nothing will happen,” Lula said.
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