The United Nations reported that countries' climate goals to stave off climate change effects are on route to fail and threaten to cause catastrophic global warming.
International governments have been, for the most part, unable to limit rising temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal that was set out in the 2015 Paris agreement. Our planet Earth is already suffering from severe climate-related storms, heatwaves, and floods amid temperatures of 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
UN Climate Goals
On Wednesday, the UN's climate experts said that the world is still failing to address the issue and act with sufficient urgency to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In a statement, officials said that the world was still nowhere near the scale and pace of emission reductions that are required to put climate effects that are acceptable.
The UN added that to keep the goal alive, national governments need to strengthen their climate action plans immediately and quickly implement them in the next eight years. Climate experts noted that emissions, when compared with 2010 levels, need to drop by 43% by 2030 in order to meet the goals set in the Paris deal, as per Aljazeera.
However, in the UN's latest report, the agency noted that commitments from governments will, in fact, increase emissions by 10.6% by 2030 if nothing is done. But the report also found that this was "an improvement" over last year's assessment, which forecasted that countries were on a path to increase emissions by 13.7% by the same year.
The executive secretary of UN Climate Change, Simon Stiell, said that while all countries agreed to revisit and strengthen their climate plans last year during the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), only 24 nations gave updates or new climate plans since then, calling the situation "disappointing."
According to the New York Times, with each fraction of a degree that the planet's temperature rises, tens of millions of people worldwide become exposed to life-threatening heatwaves, food and water scarcity, and coastal flooding. This comes as millions more mammals, insects, birds, and plants would be at risk of disappearing completely.
Catastrophic Global Warming
The UN's report also comes less than two weeks before nations are set to convene at UN climate talks in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, to discuss the unfulfilled promises. They will take stock of the fight to stave off environmental catastrophe.
However, the war between Russia and Ukraine in Europe, an international energy crisis, global inflation, and political turmoil in several countries such as Britain and Brazil, have distracted world leaders and complicated cooperative efforts to tackle global warming.
The European Union on Monday said that it would work to increase its emissions reduction pledges "as soon as possible" but noted that it was unable to do so until its member states agreed on a number of upcoming climate laws.
Despite some progress in fighting climate change, experts note that many net-zero targets remain uncertain and postpone future critical action that needs to be taken now, the United Nations News reported.
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