The UN estimated Tuesday that nations’ carbon-cutting pledges imply a far-from-sufficient 10-percent emissions cut by 2035, cautioning that it was unable to provide a robust global overview after most countries failed to submit their plans on time.
With just days to go before tense COP30 climate talks in Brazil, vulnerable small island nations slammed an “alarming” lack of new climate pledges, especially from major polluters.
UN Climate Change was unable to include crucial targets announced by China and the European Union in its formal assessment of national 2035 pledges because neither has officially submitted detailed plans.
Instead, it incorporated these announcements in a rough calculation alongside its report, showing the world is for the first time setting heat-trapping emissions on a falling trajectory — but nowhere near fast enough.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last week that slow action from nations meant it was “inevitable” that efforts to limit temperature rise to 1.5°C would fail in the short term, unleashing devastating impacts during a period of overshoot as countries worked to pull temperatures back down again by the end of the century.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said emissions must fall 60 percent by 2035 from 2019 levels for a good chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — the more ambitious goal of the Paris climate deal.
“The science is equally clear that temperatures absolutely can and must be brought back down to 1.5°C as quickly as possible after any temporary overshoot, by substantially stepping up the pace on all fronts,” UN climate chief Simon Stiell said in a statement.
The two-week COP30 climate negotiations in the Amazon, which start on November 10, are tasked with galvanising momentum in the face of a hostile United States, geopolitical tensions, and economic concerns.
They also come as the uptake of renewable energy across the world — driven by China — has given impetus to countries’ 2023 promise to “transition away” from polluting fossil fuels.
The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) noted the “alarming lack of updated targets, especially from bigger countries with significantly more resources than developing countries which bear the disproportionate burden of a climate crisis they did not cause.”
It added that the pace of progress should “send shock waves through every citizen.”
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries committed to limit global warming to well below 2°C since the pre-industrial era (1850–1900) — 1.5°C if possible.
Cox’s Bazar Life Desk/BSS
