UN: Drastic measures needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Without drastic measures by mainly all industrialised countries, the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement targets will not be met. That stressed the UN Environment Programme UNEP in a new annual report published ahead of the climate conference COP29 taking place in November in Baku.

“Climate crunch time is here,” said UNEP’s executive director Inger Andersen. “If countries don’t implement the current pledges and then show a whole lot more ambition in new pledges accompanied by rapid delivery, the “Paris Agreement target of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 will be dead within a few years and the target of well below 2 degrees Celsius will take its place in the intensive care unit.”

Greenhouse gas emissions needed to be reduced by 42 per cent by 2030 compared to 2019 to meet the target of 1.5degrees Celsius. For 2 degrees Celsius, a 28 per cent reduction is needed. However, according to Andersen, the world is now in the best-case scenario on track to limit global warming to 2.6 degrees this century.

Currently, the Earth is already about 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than before the industrial age when humanity started using more and more fossil fuels. UNEP stresses in the new report that the target of 1.5 degrees Celsius is still technically feasible, but only if rich countries in particular “make a massive global effort”.

UNEP is mainly looking at countries in the G20 group of major industrialized and emerging countries, but excluding the African Union, which has also recently joined. Together, these countries were responsible for 77 per cent of the emissions in 2023. If the African Union is included, this share rises to 82 per cent. This small difference, according to UNEP, also shows that rich countries need to do more.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres added in a video message that “there is a direct link between increasing emissions and increasingly frequent and intense climate disasters”. “Around the world, people are paying a terrible price,” he said. “Record emissions mean record sea temperatures supercharging monster hurricanes, record heat is turning forests into tinderboxes and cities into saunas, record rains are resulting in biblical floods. We’re playing with fire, but there can be no more playing for time. We’re out of time.”

^{Executive director of the UN Environment Programme Inger Andersen © BELGA PHOTO SIMON MAINA / AFP}