Climate crunch time is here. Greenhouse gas emissions hit their highest levels last year. This year is on track to surpass 2023 as the warmest on record. We’ve seen raging wildfires, ruinous storms, deadly floods, and creeping desertification and land degradation. We’ll see all these impacts next year. And we’ll see them grow stronger and more frequent with each passing year. Unless we do something.
The next round of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – or NDC’s 3.0 – are our chance to do something. They are, in fact, our last chance to avoid overshooting 1.5°C.
Current NDCs put the world on track for a global temperature rise of 2.6 to 2.8°C this century. Current policies are worse, putting us on track for 3.1°C. The consequences of these outcomes would be brutal. For sustainable development. For nature. For economies. And above all for people – particularly the most vulnerable, living in places like Small Island Developing States and Least-Developed Countries.
To keep 1.5°C possible, and avoid an increasingly unliveable future, the new NDCs must promise to cut 42 per cent off greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 57 per cent by 2035. They must set concrete sectoral and national mitigation targets with credible transition pathways, concrete policies and defined financing needs. They must specify adaptation priorities to protect people and their livelihoods. And they must be integrated within broader development strategies to ensure they drive sustainability.
Of course, nations must then meet these promises, which will require global mobilization at an unprecedented scale and pace. The G20 will need to do the heavy lifting. Because we know that the G20, excluding the African Union, is responsible for 77 per cent of emissions.
UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2024 tells us it is mathematically possible. The potential is there to cut 31 gigatons of CO2 equivalent – around 52 per cent of 2023 emissions – by 2030.
Nations can deliver by ensuring their NDCs drive the transition from coal, oil and gas to clean energy – in line with the COP28 outcome. Solar and wind alone can deliver 27 per cent of the 2030 potential.
Nations can deliver by backing nature-based solutions. Reduced deforestation, increased reforestation and improved forest management alone can deliver 19 per cent of the 2030 potential.
They can deliver by investing in methane reduction strategies, which will slow global temperature increase, buy time for decarbonization and reduce air pollution.
They can deliver by implementing efficiency and circularity measures in energy and resource use – covering everything from cooling to construction materials such as steel and concrete, all of which would reduce planetary pressures and allow more equitable sharing of resources.
These, and many other, solutions deliver on the Rio conventions and beyond. So, mindfully converging investments, policies and actions will address the whole triple planetary crisis – the crisis of climate change, the crisis of nature, land and biodiversity loss, and the crisis of pollution and waste.
The overarching priority is to push climate efforts that also protect nature and biodiversity. That restore degraded land. That reduce pollution of the air, water and land. That deliver on mitigation and adaptation. The NDCs simply must align with all plans under all environmental agreements.
Delivering on promises of finance and transparency in implementing mitigation ambition and establishing mechanisms for funding to flow will be foundational. Because investment is key that will unlock action.
Yes, the estimated incremental cost for net-zero is US$0.9 to 2.1 trillion per year from 2021 to 2050. But climate change is already doing huge economic damage. New research, including from central banks, keeps upping the estimates of long-term harm to global GDP. The cost of allowing climate change to intensify would far outweigh the cost of investing in net-zero.
Friends,
We are facing a huge and daunting task to avoid overshooting 1.5°C. Nonetheless, we must try. Because every fraction of a degree avoided matters in terms of lives saved, economies protected, damages avoided, biodiversity conserved and the ability to rapidly bring down any overshoot.
