“Decisions made this decade will largely determine whether world leaders can limit global warming to 1.5 or two degrees Celsius of warming below pre-industrial levels and avoid the increasingly more drastic impacts of the climate crisis.”
The Summary for Policymakers, released Monday, found that all economic sectors would need to launch “rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions before 2030 in order to have a more than 50 percent chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or a more than 67 percent chance of limiting it to two degrees Celsius of warming. However, the IPCC emphasized that it is entirely possible to improve the global outlook if world leaders act urgently.
“Mainstreaming effective and equitable climate action will not only reduce losses and damages for nature and people, it will also provide wider benefits,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said in a press release. “This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.”
The report states “unequivocally” that human activity, in particular the releasing of greenhouse gas emissions, has already warmed the planet by 1.1 degrees Celsius above the average for 1850 to 1900, and this has already led to “widespread and rapid changes” in the air, ocean and on land. What’s more, the World Resources Institute pointed out, these changes are more severe than expected, with flooding and other extreme storms displacing more than 20 million people from their homes annually since 2008 while, at the same time, around half of the world’s population deals with severe water scarcity at least one month out of every year.
However, it is still possible to limit global warming to 1.5 or two degrees Celsius by the end of the century if emissions are nearly halved this decade and reach net zero by either the early 2050s for 1.5 degrees or the early 2070s for two degrees. Achieving this will require major reduction to the development and extraction of fossil fuels: current fossil fuel infrastructure would emit enough on its own to overshoot the 1.5 degree temperature target, the report authors found, while both current and planned developments devour the remaining carbon budget for two degrees of warming.
The news comes the week after President Joe Biden approved ConocoPhillips’s controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, despite promises to halve U.S. emissions by 2030.
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