The IPCC report: "a litany of broken climate promises"

Extreme weather (photo: Jonathan Ford)

"We are on a fast track to climate disaster." UN Secretary-General António Guterres said of the latest IPCC report in a statement. He also referred to it as “a litany of broken climate promises.” And he summarised the current climate change challenge as "To keep the 1.5-degree limit agreed in Paris within reach, we need to cut global emissions by 45 percent this decade. But current climate pledges would mean a 14 percent increase in emissions."

These are some takeaways from the third and last report of the sixth assessment cycle of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Emissions still go up

In 2019, global greenhouse gas emissions were 54 percent higher than in 1990. So that was about the time (in 1992) when the world's governments got so worried about those emissions that they signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and thereby recognized that climate change is potentially a significant threat to the world's environment and economic development.

Emissions are now at their highest level ever. The report mentions that the average annual growth rate slowed down from 2.1 percent per year between 2000 and 2009 to 1.3 percent between 2010 and 2019. In the days to come, we will hear more about the negotiations in Geneva for the summary. I expect that someone will say more about this optimistic note that has been quoted today by many of the world's leading newspapers. The more alarming formulation "highest level ever" is my choice of words; the report speaks about "continue to rise," while the optimistic note about lower growth rates in emissions is from the report. But when we have less than eight years to bend a projected rise of 14 percent into a decrease of global emissions of 45 percent, that annual drop of 0.8 percent is not impressive, nor does it give me any hope.

source: IPCC Report

Inequality

In any IPCC report that I have seen, it always strikes me how unequal the contribution to the climate change problem has been. You can see this in the following graph in the report, which shows that the historical contributions to CO2 emissions between 1850 and 2019 vary substantially across regions. For example, the Least Developed Countries in de world contributed less than 0.4% of historical cumulative CO2 emissions, while the Small Island Developing States contributed 0.5%. 

source: IPCC Report

There are also some reasons for hope 

But there is good news too. In the past decade, there have been spectacular drops in the unit costs of several low-emission technologies. For example, the unit costs of solar energy dropped by 85 percent, wind energy by 55 percent, and lithium-ion batteries by 85 percent. And these much lower prices led to significant increases in their deployment; for instance, a tenfold increase for solar, and there were a hundred times more electric vehicles (EVs) by the end of the last decade.

But inequality is always a factor in any aspect of the climate challenge and is noticeable here. While innovation policy packages have enabled these cost reductions and supported global adoption, this wave of innovation has lagged in developing countries.

Source: IPCC Report

There is no time to lose 

According to the report, only immediate and ambitious climate action will prevent global temperatures from climbing 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If the planet warms beyond this point, scientists warn that we will face significant climate change with grave consequences for people, wildlife, and ecosystems.

If current emissions trends continue, the world will warm by around 3.2 degrees Celsius. And even if current national climate promises are implemented, we will still fail to restrict warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius; instead, we will be on track towards at least 2.2 degrees Celsius, if not more.

Source: IPCC Report

Limiting warming to around 1.5 Celsius does not only require global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest and be reduced by 43% by 2030; at the same time, methane would also need to be reduced by about a third. Even if we do this, it is almost inevitable that we will temporarily exceed this temperature threshold but could return to below it by the end of the century.

But such a 43 percent reduction (while emissions are still rising) isn't possible without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors. The global temperature will stabilize when carbon dioxide emissions reach net zero. For 1.5 Celsius, this means achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions globally in the early 2050s; for 2 Celsius, it is in the early 2070s.

If you have set your hopes on at least limiting warming to around 2 Celsius, you won't like the numbers for that assessment. It still requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 and be reduced by a quarter by 2030. 

Reading the headlines in the newspapers these weeks about increased calls for more fossil fuels in various regions in the world, I fear we may be exceeding this less preferable threshold as well. 

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I write these newsletters, share my photos, do interviews, make podcasts about the environment, and share my travels because I believe that together we can do better on this beautiful but fragile planet.

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Notes:

IPCC, 2022: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, R. Slade, A. Al Khourdajie, R. van Diemen, D. McCollum, M. Pathak, S. Some, P. Vyas, R. Fradera, M. Belkacemi, A. Hasija, G. Lisboa, S. Luz, J. Malley, (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA. doi: 10.1017/9781009157926.001

https://www.un.org/sg/en/node/262847