UNEP: Opportunity has ‘been lost’ to meet 1.5C warming limit without ‘overshoot’
A UN Environment Programme report states that a temporary breach of the 1.5C global warming limit is now inevitable due to decades of insufficient climate action. The report emphasizes the need to minimize temperature overshoot and accelerate emissions cuts.
Why it matters
This official assessment underscores the widening gap between current global climate pledges and the actions required to stave off catastrophic climate change.
Share A temporary breach of the 1.5C global-warming limit is now “inevitable” following “decades of insufficient climate action”, says the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
In its “sobering” annual assessment of the global “emissions gap”, UNEP says that exceeding the Paris Agreement ’s 1.5C limit is “imminent and unavoidable”.
This year’s report , titled “The point of return”, says the “task now” is to minimise the size and scale of a temperature “ overshoot ” and to “establish a credible return path to 1.5C by the end of the century”.
Even the “lowest possible” overshoot scenario for 1.5C would first see global warming peak at around 1.7-1.8C in the middle of the century before declining, says the report.
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