Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to prevent the worst of climate change would be relatively cheap and technologically feasible, but governments and financial bodies are failing to do so as they continue to prop up the fossil fuel industry. That’s the conclusion of a landmark report published Monday by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The report focuses on solutions that could limit average global warming to 1.5°C since the preindustrial era—a threshold after which the impacts of climate change become catastrophic and irreversible. This is the first mitigation-focused report put out by the IPCC since the Paris Agreement was signed. It is part of a package of three reports—the other two focused on the state of climate science and adaptation—published every seven years by the IPCC.
But the IPCC admits the 1.5°C target set under the Paris Agreement now looks unlikely. Policies implemented by the end of 2020 put the world on a path to 3.2°C of warming. And even government pledges on reducing emissions, made in the run up to last year’s U.N. climate summit and have yet to be fully enacted, would overshoot the 1.5°C target, the IPCC said.
Countries accounting for more than 80% of global GDP have pledged to reach net zero emissions by around mid-century—this is the point at which they are putting less greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than they remove.. Many governments, though, plan to rely heavily on still-developing carbon capture technologies, or tree-planting over massive areas of land, in order to offset emissions from continuing to use fossil fuels for years to come. And questions over governments’ reliance on these solutions versus the need for policies to phase-out fossil fuels were a key sticking point as negotiations delayed the release of the report.
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Source : time
