This year was supposed to be a turning point in addressing climate change. But the world’s nations are failing to meet the moment, states a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme.
The Emissions Gap Report 2021: The Heat Is On, released October 26, reveals that current pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and rein in global warming still put the world on track to warm by 2.7 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century.
Aiming for “net-zero emissions” by midcentury — a goal recently announced by China, the United States and other countries, but without clear plans on how to do so — could reduce that warming to 2.2 degrees C. But that still falls short of the mark, U.N. officials stated at a news event for the report’s release.
At a landmark meeting in Paris in 2015, 195 nations pledged to eventually reduce their emissions enough to hold global warming to well below 2 degrees C by 2100 (SN: 12/12/15). Restricting global warming further, to just 1.5 degrees C, would forestall many more devastating consequences of climate change, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reported in 2018 (SN: 12/17/18). In its latest report, released in August, the IPCC noted that extreme weather events, exacerbated by human-caused climate change, now occur in every part of the planet — and warned that the window to reverse some of these effects is closing (SN: 8/9/21).