“LIMITED PICTURE”
The two-week COP30 climate negotiations in the Amazon, which start on Nov 10, are tasked with galvanising momentum in the face of a hostile United States, geopolitical tensions, economic concerns and fears that the most ambitious climate targets are already slipping out of reach.
The 2015 Paris climate accords aimed to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial (1850 to 1900) levels – and 1.5 degrees Celsius if possible.
With average warming already around 1.4 degrees Celsius today, many scientists believe that the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold will likely be breached before the end of this decade as humans continue to burn oil, gas and coal.
But they stress that each fraction of a degree of temperature increase avoided is crucial to limit the danger.
If temperatures overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius, experts say humanity would likely have to try to pull warming back down by using technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere that are not yet operational at scale.
Under the Paris Agreement, each country is supposed to provide increasingly ambitious plans known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) every five years, with plans to 2035 due in this year.
The UN on Tuesday said just 64 of the nearly 200 parties to the Paris Agreement had submitted their NDCs by its end-of-September cut-off date for the official annual report.
As a result, Stiell said the document “provides quite a limited picture”, compelling the UN to attempt a more general calculation.
“This wider picture, though still incomplete, shows global emissions falling by around 10 per cent by 2035,” he said.
