A few days before the start of the next UN climate conference (COP26), the commitments of the States are still clearly insufficient to hope to limit climate upheavals to a viable threshold, and thus meet the commitments made under the Agreement. from Paris five years ago.
As policymakers and several companies vie for announcements to reiterate their will to act to prevent the sinking of the global climate, the scientific data shows instead that the commitments are still below what is necessary to succeed in avoiding the worst. .
According to new data published on Tuesday by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the updated commitments of the various signatories of the Paris Agreement still do not allow the objectives of the agreement signed in December to be met. 2015, or limit warming to 2 ° C, or even 1.5 ° C, compared to the pre-industrial era.
With the global temperature rise already reaching 1.1 ° C, the most recent edition of UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report predicts that the planetary thermometer will continue to climb, reaching an increase of at least 2.7 ° C d ‘by the end of the century. This announced increase is attributable, according to UNEP, to the States’ lack of ambition in terms of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The UN also warned last week that the production of fossil fuels planned for the coming years is far too important to hope to limit global warming.
Increase in GHGs
Concretely, countries that will take part in COP26 during the first two weeks of November were invited to submit an update of their “Nationally Determined Contribution” (NDC). So far, 143 parties (out of 192 in the Paris Agreement) have tabled this update, including Canada.
The problem is that the commitments, even including those that have been increased, are not enough to put the planet on the right climate trajectory. According to UNEP data and figures released Monday by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the reductions announced in the NDC updates only cut 7.5% to 9% of planned emissions in 2030, assuming that States’ commitments are honored. However, the reduction should be 45% to 55%, compared to the level of 2010, to hope to be able to limit the warming to 1.5 ° C.
The climate trajectory is worse when all the commitments of the 192 Parties to the Paris Agreement are taken into account. According to the UNFCCC, we are indeed heading towards an increase in GHG emissions of around 16% by 2030, compared to the 2010 level.
These data must sound like a red flag for the delegations which will present themselves in Glasgow, in Scotland, for the COP26, reacted the executive secretary of UN Climate, Patricia Espinosa, in a press release. “Exceeding our targets for limiting global warming will lead us to a destabilized world marked by endless suffering, especially for those who have contributed the least to GHG emissions. “
A very small group of countries indeed bear great historical responsibility in the climate crisis which continues to worsen, according to what emerges from an analysis published earlier this month by the British organization Carbon Brief, specializing in the climate information. Canada, which has already emitted more than 65 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases since the start of the industrial era, is part of the lot, while Canadians, taken individually, are themselves very large emitters.
In a per capita comparison of historical emissions, Canadians thus appear to be number one in the world, with emissions of 1,751 tonnes of GHGs per capita (compared to 1,547 tonnes for Americans). This method of calculation, which however assumes that all historical emissions are assumed by the current population, shows above all that despite its small population, Canada is a major emitter of GHGs, according to Carbon Brief.
Irreversible consequences
A warming such as that predicted by the UNEP and the UNFCCC would cause an increase in extreme climatic events, a decline in cultivable areas and water resources in several regions, an irreversible melting of the ice in the poles, a thawing of the permafrost which would release water. huge quantities of methane, a considerable rise in ocean levels, the disappearance of major parts of the world’s biodiversity and the influx of millions of climate refugees. The impacts of the climate crisis are expected to force more than 200 million people to leave their region or country by 2050, according to the World Bank.
Although climate change has not yet reached the dramatic thresholds set out in this new international scientific report, the consequences are already very real, underlined the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its most recent report. , published in August. Heatwaves, heatwaves and droughts have certainly been “more frequent and intense” in most parts of the world since the 1950s, as have intense precipitation events.
Humanity is also responsible for the melting of the ice in Greenland, the melting of several glaciers on the planet, and the marked decline of Arctic sea ice. The same goes for the rise in the level of the oceans and their warming. Under the influence of the melting polar ice, the level of the oceans will continue to rise for centuries, even millennia.
The level of the oceans, which has already risen 20 cm since 1900, could still rise by about 50 cm by 2100, even assuming that we can limit the warming to + 2 ° C. Such a scenario represents a direct threat to coastal regions such as eastern Quebec.
For the first time, the IPCC also underlined in its report “not being able to exclude” the occurrence of “tipping points”, such as the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet or the death of forests, which would drag the climate system towards a dramatic and irremediable change. Signs in this direction are already visible in the Amazon, the largest tropical forest on the planet.