WASHINGTON • Despite a recent flurry of new national emissions pledges, the world is still far away from preventing catastrophic climate change, experts say - noting that major polluters including China and Russia have yet to submit revised plans before a major UN climate summit later this year.
Nearly half of the 200 nations that signed the 2015 Paris climate accord failed to submit new pledges by an end-July UN deadline. Saudi Arabia and India are among about 90 countries that have yet to detail how they will beef up their previous targets.
"It's abysmal. It's absolutely unacceptable," said Dr Saleemul Huq, chair of the expert advisory group of the Climate Vulnerable Forum of 48 countries, adding that countries' progress should be measured by the real-world action they are taking to cut emissions - not just their targets for future years.
"What the countries are doing or not doing is what matters," Dr Huq said, "and what they're doing is not keeping us below 1.5 degrees".
Countries agreed under the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent average global temperatures from rising beyond 1.5 deg C, the threshold that scientists say would head off the worst impacts of warming. To do that, scientists say, the world must cut global emissions in half by 2030, and to net-zero by 2050.
The new pledges submitted barely moved the needle towards that goal, with many of them from developing countries with a small carbon footprint. Countries responsible for over half (53 per cent) of current global emissions either have yet to submit a new or updated nationally determined contribution (NDC), said the World Resources Institute (WRI).
WRI, which tracks national climate pledges, estimates the total updated pledges to date would lower 2030 emissions by around 2.3 billion tonnes, or gigatonnes (Gt), of CO2-equivalent compared with the national pledges under the 2015 Paris Agreement. At present, countries send out around 50 Gt of emissions per year.
Since March, the United States and the European Union - the world's second-and third-biggest emitters after China - have set tougher emissions-cutting targets. Countries that missed the July 30 deadline for updating their NDCs face intense pressure to do so before the UN's next global climate conference, called COP26, from Oct 31 to Nov 12 in Scotland.
China said it plans to announce an updated NDC before November, after pledging last year to reach net-zero emissions by 2060. The Group of 20 (G-20) rich nations made a similar promise last month to update their NDCs in time for the conference.
"Any big change that we will see is going to come from those major emitters that haven't submitted yet," said WRI senior fellow Taryn Fransen.
While the global emissions trend is currently projected to flatten by 2030, thanks to pledges made so far, it would need more ambitious targets from many of the world's larger economies in order to decrease, said Dr Niklas Hohne of the NewClimate Institute, a European think-tank that tracks countries' climate commitments.
"This global gap is huge," he said. Closing that gap would require not just more bold pledges, but also for some countries to overshoot their targets in coming years.
Countries whose updated pledges "failed to raise ambition", such as Australia, Brazil and Mexico, would also need to boost their commitments, said Mr Alex Scott at climate change think-tank E3G.
COP26 is seen as a crucial chance to clinch agreements, for example, towards phasing out coal or financing forest protections or infrastructure adaptation.
But striking those deals will be tougher if the world's big emitters are not committed to cutting their own emissions fast.
Bigger economies with higher emissions levels must "do their fair share", said Mr Carlos Fuller, lead negotiator on climate change for the Alliance of Small Island States.
In the past, emerging economies like India and China had resisted tough action that might constrain their economic development.
But as climate change delivers weather extremes, from deadly heat waves to enormous wildfires, some countries that are especially vulnerable say they are getting fed up with others dragging their feet.
"The delay has been incredibly frustrating," said Ms Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, where sea level rise threatens to inundate the land. The country was the first to submit a new NDC in November 2018.
Ms Stege said the pressure is firmly on G-20 countries.
REUTERS
