Analysis: The United Nations is beginning to sound like a broken record on climate change – so much so that it has named its latest report Broken Record.
The UN Environment Programme’s annual Emissions Gap report, which provides regular updates on the progress of national climate targets and climate policies against what is needed to keep warming below 1.5C and 2C, has yet again found that global ambition is not high enough.
The 2023 edition of the Emissions Gap Report tells us “the world must change track, or we will be saying the same thing next year – and the year after, and the year after, like a broken record”, Inger Andersen, the executive director of the environment programme, writes in the foreword to the report.
On current policies, there is a two thirds chance global warming will peak at or below 3C – falling well short of the Paris Agreement’s requirement to limit heating to “well below” 2C.
Pledges submitted by countries under the Paris Agreement reduce that to 2.5C–2.9C, depending on how fully they are implemented. If separate net-zero commitments (for example the one in New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Act) are also achieved, the range falls further to 2C–2.7C.
These temperature projections are all slightly higher than last year’s. This isn’t because of global backsliding, but because more models have been incorporated into this year’s report.
The figures are clear that even if every country in the world does the absolute most it has promised to on climate change, 1.5C is still very likely out of reach. In the most optimistic scenario, there is just a 14 percent chance of keeping warming to 1.5C.
Even just burning the coal, oil and gas expected from existing mines and fields would exceed the remaining carbon budget for 1.5C by 250 percent and come very close to exhausting the 2C budget as well.
In other words, much more stringent cuts are needed than those already pledged.
This is crucial information before COP28, where the first Global Stocktake process of climate action under the Paris Agreement is due to conclude. We are also likely to see serious discussions about the next round of Paris targets, covering 2031-2035, which are due by early 2025. These will have to be much more ambitious if 1.5C is to be preserved.
The report also lands against a backdrop of worsening climate impacts. The broken record referred to in the title is not just how the UN feels.
“Humanity is breaking all the wrong records when it comes to climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions reached a new high in 2022. In September 2023, global average temperatures were 1.8C above pre-industrial levels,” Andersen wrote. “When this year is over, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, it is almost certain to be the warmest year on record.”
For at least the past two days, global temperatures have averaged more than 2C above pre-industrial levels. This doesn’t mean we’ve crossed the 1.5C or 2C threshold (those limits refer to warming above those levels for multiple decades) but it does show how the impacts of burning fossil fuels will only become more noticeable in the coming years.
None of this is ideal for the incoming National-led government, which has already faced a backlash on the world stage from Vanuatu and Germany for its pledge to restart offshore oil and gas exploration.
The new government will be charged with setting New Zealand’s second Paris target in under 18 months, after receiving advice from the Climate Change Commission next year. This target must be more ambitious than the current one, according to the Paris treaty. But neither the outgoing nor the incoming government has a plan to meet the current one.
New Zealand’s existing target, a headline figure of a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2030 but which breaks down to something more like a 20 percent cut when carbon accounting tricks are peeled away, is expected to cost between $3 billion and $23 billion over this decade.
National hasn’t explained how it will pay for this, with climate change spokesperson Simon Watts suggesting in a debate on RNZ before the election that the party would simply cut emissions domestically by three times more than the climate commission has said is feasible or achievable.
Then there’s the fact that even this target could be thrown out, if the activist group Lawyers for Climate Action has their way in a case being heard before the Court of Appeal this week. The group’s co-founder, Jenny Cooper KC, told the court on Tuesday that the current target isn’t consistent with 1.5C and needs to be strengthened.
The scale of New Zealand’s existing climate commitments, the mounting domestic and global pressure to increase those pledges, the need to set the next round of targets and the ever-worsening climate impacts are rapidly coming to a head.
National was relatively light on climate policy during the election campaign, but it will have no choice but to roll up its sleeves and dig into the work if it truly plans to preserve New Zealand’s status as a climate leader.
Marc, how are emissions bought about by the manufacture and use of private jets, luxury yachts, cruise liners and overseas travel, in other words, the pastimes and toys of the wealthy and middle classes, to be assessed? Are these sorts of luxuries to remain unaccounted for? Will they be discussing these factors at COP28? Is there any point in COP28 without due recognition to the biosphereic damage wrought by the unrelenting accumulation and disposal of wealth among the world’s uncaring?