Global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions remain catastrophically off track, with current policies putting the world on course for a 3.1°C temperature rise by century’s end, the UN Environment Programme warned Thursday in its annual “Emissions Gap” report.
To keep the 1.5°C target alive, nations must slash emissions by 42% by 2030 and 57% by 2035 – yet emissions continue to climb, hitting record highs last year.
“Either leaders bridge the emissions gap or we plunge headlong into climate disaster with the poorest and most vulnerable suffering the most,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres told reporters at the report’s launch.
“The emissions gap is not an abstract notion. There is a direct link between increasing emissions and increasingly intense climate disasters worldwide,” Guterres said. “People are paying a terrible price.”
Despite a year marked by devastating hurricanes, droughts and floods, no country implemented policies “with significant implications for global emissions in 2023,” UNEP found.
“Another year has passed without action, and that means we’re worse off,” said Ann Olhoff, the report’s lead scientific editor. “The findings are fairly similar to last year, apart from emissions still going up.”
Twenty-nine years after international climate talks began, the sum total of global climate pledges – known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – would allow temperatures to rise by a “catastrophic” 2.6°C, even if fully implemented, according to the report. Most major economies, including many G20 nations, are failing to meet even these insufficient commitments – let alone achieve the 42% emissions cuts needed.
By mid-century, current trajectories point to warming well above 1.5°C, with up to a one-in-three chance of exceeding 2°C. The report warns that warming is expected to intensify beyond 2100, as CO2 emissions are not projected to reach net zero under existing scenarios.
Each year of delay makes the task harder: Global emissions must now fall 7.5% every year until 2035 to keep warming to 1.5 C. For a 2 C limit, yearly cuts of 4% are needed.
“If we procrastinate, that figure will obviously grow with every year of inaction,” said UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen. “Nations must show a massive increase in ambition in these new NDCs, accompanied by rapid delivery, or the Paris Agreement goal of holding global warming to 1.5°C will be dead within a few years.”
With nations due to update their climate pledges ahead of COP30 in Brazil next year, UNEP says this represents a make-or-break moment. The new commitments must deliver what the agency calls a “quantum leap” to avoid planetary catastrophe.
“Limiting warming to 1.5°C is one of the greatest asks of the modern era,” Andersen said. “We may not make it. But the only certain path to failure is not trying.”
Going backwards
In a year that demanded cuts, emissions instead rose 1.3% to record levels in 2023, with coal accounting for 65% of the increase, according to the International Energy Agency.
While record deployments of renewable energy, nuclear power and electric vehicles helped curb emissions growth, they couldn’t keep pace with rising energy demand and the impact of severe droughts on hydropower generation.
Without this rapid expansion of clean technologies, emissions growth would have been three times higher, according to IEA data.
Only one pathway identified in the report halts warming beyond 2100: All 107 countries with net-zero pledges must deliver on their promises and quickly put their plans into action. This could cap warming at 1.9°C, but UNEP has “low” confidence countries will follow through. Countries accounting for 82% of global emissions have made net-zero promises, but progress has stalled.
“Current policies, conditional NDCs, unconditional NDCs – in any of these scenarios, whether emissions peak and fall a small amount or plateau, all of them represent a lost decade,” said Neil Grant, a lead author of the report.
“Winning slowly is the same as losing when it comes to climate change.”
G20 nations must ‘do the heavy lifting’
Just six countries accounted for 63% of global emissions in 2023, with the least developed nations contributing only 3%, highlighting particular concerns about inaction among major emitters, especially the G20.
“We identified very few newly adopted policies [by G20 nations] underpinned by quantitative assessments that deliver considerable emission reduction impact by 2030 or beyond. This is very worrying,” said Takeshi Kuramochi, lead author of the G20 section of the report. “It’s been a calm past 12 months, in a negative way.”
Seven G20 members – China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Turkey – have not yet reached peak emissions, a pre-requisite to achieving net zero. For G20 nations that have peaked, including the US, EU, Russia and Canada, “their rate of decarbonization would need to accelerate – in some cases dramatically – after 2030 to achieve their net-zero goals unless they accelerate action now,” UNEP found.
“We must remember that 1.5°C is not an on-off switch that will plunge the world into an era of darkness and chaos,” Andersen said. “We are operating on a sliding scale of disruption. Every fraction of a degree avoided counts in terms of lives saved, economies protected, damages avoided, biodiversity conserved.”
“The G20, particularly the members that dominate emissions, need to do the heavy lifting,” Andersen added. “Climate crunch time is here.”
‘Wartime’ mobilization is required to keep 1.5C alive
While there is “no chance” of limiting global warming to 1.5C under current policies, UNEP insists the target remains “technically possible” – but only through “immediate global mobilization on a scale and pace only ever seen following a global conflict.”
A sweeping transformation of energy, transport, and land use could cut 31 gigatonnes of CO2 annually – equivalent to 52% of global emissions – through existing technologies costing less than $200 per ton of carbon, UNEP estimates.
Solar and wind energy alone could deliver 27% of required emissions cuts by 2030, rising to 38% by 2035, while forest protection and restoration could contribute another 20%. Together, these measures would deliver the steep emissions cuts scientists say are needed to keep 1.5C alive.
“Nations can deliver the cuts needed by investing heavily in solar power and wind energy, in forests, in reforming the buildings, transport and industry sectors,” Andersen said. “This is a gargantuan task that requires global mobilization on a scale and pace never seen before. But it does, for the moment, remain technically possible.”
The price tag for this transformation is steep but achievable, according to UNEP. Annual investment in mitigation measures must increase six-fold to 11.7$ trillion per year by 2035 – approximately 10% of the global economy.
“These investments don’t even take all the benefits into account and the avoided damages,” Olhoff said. “It would be very costly not to invest in a green transition.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Image Credits: Joanne Francis.
