The World Is Ignoring Its Pledge to Shift Away From Fossil Fuels
(Bloomberg) -- At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai two years ago, countries reached a first-of-a-kind agreement to transition their economies away from fossil fuels.
Yet none of the roughly 60 countries that have submitted an updated climate pledge since then have put in place targets to reduce oil and gas production or phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.
That’s the finding of a new report by the United Nations Environment Programme, which says that global temperatures will likely soon rise to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the key goal outlined by the Paris Agreement. It’s the latest sign that the world is moving too slowly in curbing greenhouse gas pollution, and that it’s still reluctant to tackle the root cause of the problem: emissions from fossil fuels.
“This is something we need to denounce,” Teresa Ribera, executive vice president at the European Commission, said in an interview in Sao Paulo. “We committed to transition away from fossil fuels and of course we all knew that it was not going to be something to be solved from one year to the next, but we cannot forget about this commitment.”
The UNEP report shows the scale of the challenge confronting leaders just two days before they arrive in the Brazilian city of Belém to open the United Nations’ COP30 summit. How to implement the pledge to quit oil, gas and coal — as energy demand rises and under pressure from US President Donald Trump to boost production — will be a major issue.
Even Brazil, the summit’s host, has granted approval to its state-owned energy company, Petrobras, to explore for oil in the mouth of the Amazon River.
“We’re as close to unavoidable as can be before we breach 1.5C,” Anne Olhoff, UNEP’s chief climate advisor, said in an interview. “We need to go back to the drawing board.”
While limiting global warming to 1.5C by 2100 remains “technically possible,” the pathways to get there imply that temperatures first exceed the threshold, then are brought back down through more aggressive emissions reductions and further drawing down excess carbon dioxide from the air, the report states. Each additional 0.1C of warming raises the risk of triggering tipping points and irreversible climate changes.
Less than a third of countries have submitted an updated climate plan to the UN on time, and even if all pledges are fully implemented, temperatures will still rise between 2.3C and 2.5C, an improvement from last year’s projection of 2.6C to 2.8C.
Most of that improvement is due to updated policy projections and new climate pledges, while a smaller part can be explained by methodological updates, according to UNEP. But around 0.1C of avoided warming will be canceled by Trump pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement.
Even a “rapid mitigation from 2025” scenario implies the world overshooting the 1.5C goal by 0.3C before returning to the Paris goal by 2100. Still, the current projections mark a significant improvement from when the Paris Agreement was signed a decade ago and temperatures were expected to rise up to 3.5C.
“These projections highlight the potential to reduce warming significantly through immediate mitigation action,” the report states. “However, they also underline the uncomfortable truth that surpassing 1.5C is increasingly near, and that the risk of even higher levels of warming is rising fast.”
Whether COP30 responds effectively to the large gap between the 1.5C Paris goal and current projections is seen as one of the key barometers of success for the summit. It remains highly uncertain, with traditional blockers of more climate action, like Saudi Arabia, likely to be galvanized by Trump’s Paris withdrawal and a geopolitical environment that is dominated by issues other than climate change, such as trade.
Less than a third of new climate pledges set a coal phase-down target, while 62% set a target to reduce fossil fuel use in the electricity mix.
The UN’s climate arm, the UNFCCC, last week published its assessment of the latest climate pledges by countries, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). It showed that while emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are expected to fall by about 10% by 2035, they remain far short of the 60% cut that scientists say is needed.
Implementing only current policies would lead to up to 2.8C of warming compared to 3.1C last year, according to the UNEP report.
“That is a big elephant in the room — the collection of all NDCs and the evaluation of the gap,” said Laurence Tubiana, a key architect of the Paris Agreement. “We have to respond to that.”
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