Countries are not meeting the commitments they have made to address climate change

The world is not meeting the commitments it has made to reduce emissions of polluting gases, which could lead to a “catastrophic” scenario in of climate change, according to the 2024 emissions gap report entitled 'No more smoke and mirrors, please', which was published this week by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) during the Biodiversity Summit (COP16).

Climate change is also a generator of biodiversity loss and a threat to human life, so one of the things that the UNEP report makes clear is that there must be a global commitment from nations if they want to comply with the Paris Agreement not to exceed the limit of temperature increase by more than 1.5 °C and to move as far as possible away from 2 °C, a limit that if exceeded would put the planet's climate security at risk.

However, the report is devastating: if the world does not set more ambitious goals during the COP29 on Climate Change (to be held this year in Azerbaijan) and begin to meet them as quickly as possible, the planet would be heading for a temperature increase of between 2.6 and 3.1 °C over the course of this century.

According to UNEP, from a technical point of view, progress on the 1.5°C pathway is still possible, as solar, wind and forests promise rapid and radical emissions reductions. The report indicates that the emissions gap for 2030 and 2035 could be reduced at no great cost to the global economy, to less than $200 per ton of CO2 equivalent. For example, increased deployment of solar PV and wind energy technologies could contribute 27% of this total emissions reduction potential in 2030 and 38% in 2035.

However, achieving such a goal requires “immediate global mobilization at a scale and pace that has only been seen in global wars,” the paper notes. The report calls for at least a six-fold increase in investment in “emissions mitigation measures, which must be backed by a reform of the global financial architecture and strong private sector engagement”.

The G20 member countries, responsible for most of the world's emissions, are the ones who must do the heavy lifting. Unfortunately, this group, which includes economies such as the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, is still far from meeting even the current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), i.e. the global commitments currently in place to reduce polluting emissions globally.

If it fails to meet this call, the world risks facing more extreme climate scenarios than those it is already experiencing, with longer droughts, more intense floods or temperature increases that put people and the global economy at risk. “Today's emissions gap report is clear: we are playing with fire, but we can no longer buy time. We have run out of time. Closing the emissions gap means closing the ambition gap, the implementation gap and the finance gap. And all this must start at COP29,” said António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, in a video message on the report.

According to the climatologist and director of the undergraduate program in Earth System Sciences at the Universidad del Rosario, Benjamín Quesada, although there is still a possibility of achieving the objectives of the Paris Agreement, it requires actions that humanity “has not undertaken”.

“A reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of 4% each year in this decade are necessary to achieve the goal, and that is what we achieved during the strongest year of the pandemic by covid. In other words, in a very disorganized and coercive manner. The idea is just the opposite: to be able to voluntarily reduce these emissions because we know that each mitigation and adaptation action not taken today will cost us much more in losses in the future”, the expert points out.

According to Quesada, in climate change it is more costly not to act than to do so, and taking action also has many benefits for society, such as better water, air and soil quality, less mortality, better landscapes, better labor resilience, better food and better health, among others.

“The power of civil society will be crucial in demanding fair compliance with a differential approach: the high resources and the most polluting and historically responsible countries must contribute much more to allow others to live with dignity within the planetary limits,” concludes the researcher.

EDWIN CAICEDO

Environment and Health Journalist

@CaicedoUcros