U.N. report warns nations have ‘rapidly narrowing window’ to cut emissions

The landmark 2015 Paris agreement, embraced by nearly every nation on Earth, “has driven near-universal climate action,” according to a detailed United Nations assessment released Friday, and yet the world remains woefully off track in its efforts to halt the warming of the planet.

The findings published by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change note that “there is a rapidly narrowing window” for the world to more quickly cut emissions caused by the burning of fossil fuels and avoid an ever worsening set of disasters that are likely as the atmosphere grows hotter.

Friday’s report comes ahead of this year’s global climate summit, known as COP28, scheduled to kick off in late November in the United Arab Emirates. While the two-week gathering has a lengthy agenda, a central focus will be completing a formal, comprehensive assessment of how far the world has come toward meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement - and how much work remains.

That global “stocktake,” to determine whether the world is actually on pace to cut its emissions enough to meet the most ambitious aims of the Paris accord, will document some bright spots - for instance, that emissions have peaked in developed and some developing countries.

But it paints a sobering picture about the speed of change scientists say is needed.

“On the whole, we’re not doing well,” David Waskow, director of the World Resources Institute’s International Climate Initiative, said in an interview. That much, Friday’s report again makes clear.

But Waskow also said its 17 distinct findings, across topics such as adapting to climate change, boosting funding to help poor nations bypass fossil fuels as they develop and moving more urgently to cut emissions, offer a detailed road map for the type of transformations that must happen in the years ahead.

“It’s a call to action in many ways,” he said. “Now it’s in the governments’ hands to make good on it. . . . We know much of what can and needs to be done. We’re not shooting in the dark.”

Year after year, scientists and researchers, environmental advocates and governments, diplomats and policymakers have detailed the many ways in which - despite signs of progress - the world’s largest emitters have fallen short of their promises to cut carbon pollution and help smaller and more vulnerable nations contend with the deepening disasters fueled by a warming planet.

But even the high-profile promises to boost ambitions at a global climate summit in Scotland in 2021, a U.N. report late last year found, have shown few signs of becoming reality. The report noted that nations had shaved just 1 percent off their projected greenhouse gas emissions for 2030 - leaving Earth on track to steamroll past key temperature thresholds that scientists say will result in deepening catastrophes.

That same analysis found that even if countries fulfilled existing pledges, it would still put the Earth on a path to warm by a dangerous 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, compared with preindustrial levels. That is far beyond the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit written into the Paris agreement.

Even so, few nations have yet embraced the policies needed to meet even the lackluster pledge that exist, a reality that led U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to chide world leaders for “falling pitifully short.”

Likewise, last year’s global talks in Egypt ended with little progress to propel the world toward faster and more dramatic cuts in carbon emissions, in an effort to avert more climate-fueled suffering to come.

Even as diplomats and activists at COP27 applauded the creation of a fund to support vulnerable countries in the wake of disasters, many worried that nations’ reluctance to adopt more ambitious climate plans left the planet on a path toward dangerous warming.

In some ways, Friday’s U.N. assessment marks merely the latest chapter in a massive compendium of research and reports that outline the many ways in which the world has failed to adequately confront the perils of climate change.

But beyond merely documenting failures, the assessment also focuses on the transformative and wide-ranging actions that can help to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. Among them: aggressively scale up renewable energy, phasing out fossil fuels, ending deforestation, providing significant climate finance to developing nations and designing changes in ways that alleviate poverty and minimize environmental injustice.

Marcene Mitchell, senior vice president of climate change for the World Wildlife Fund, called Friday’s report another stark reminder that leaders must find ways to move faster.

“Hope is not lost. We have seen critical actions taken that are making a difference,” she said in a statement about the findings. At the same time, she said, “It is clear that we cannot continue business as usual. . . . We must face the reality that it is going to take a lot of challenging work - continued advancements in science and technology, strong political will, and actions from individuals, communities, businesses and governments if we expect to address the greatest global crisis of our time.”

For decades now, scientists have meticulously documented how humans are supercharging the warming of the planet through the burning of fossil fuels, and how that unceasing trend has led to a growing set of disasters in every corner of the globe - often, with some of the poorest populations who did little to cause the problem bearing the worse of the impacts.

But it doesn’t take sprawling reports and outspoken scientists to see the consequences of a hotter planet are growing.

This past summer has been the hottest ever recorded in human history, and its legacy is one of death and destruction and misery - from crippling and historic heat waves across many parts of the globe, to record wildfires in Canada and Europe, to biblical flooding caused by record rains in places as far flung as Greece, China and Florida.

Global emissions once again hit a record high in 2022, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to levels not seen in millions of years. The atmosphere already has warmed roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.16 Fahrenheit), and humans are pumping carbon pollution into the atmosphere so rapidly that the world could exhaust its remaining “carbon budget” in only a handful of years.

There are, of course, glimmers of progress.

The United States last year passed its first major climate legislation in history, the Inflation Reduction Act. Renewable energy installations continue to grow rapidly, and sales of electric vehicles have surged. The climate pledges made by nations in recent years, should they become reality, have turned the world’s trajectory away from some of the worst-case scenarios that seemed possible only a few years ago.

Friday’s U.N. assessment underscores that it is that sort of action that must happen in more ways, with more urgency, across more nations, if the world intends to shape the better future it promised years ago in Paris.

“It serves up a bold to-do list for governments to limit warming to 1.5 (degrees) Celsius and protect people everywhere from climate devastation,” Tom Evans, a policy adviser at the climate think tank E3G, said in a statement. “With this report in hand, governments going to COP28 have their homework set.”