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UN environment chiefs admit the 1.5-degree Paris Agreement threshold will be breached in the coming years, with some effects irreversible. The focus must shift to limiting the duration and extent of overshoot.
United Nations environment chiefs have conceded that the battle to keep global heating from passing the agreed 1.5-degree threshold has been lost. In their most explicit forecast yet, they say the target being exceeded is unavoidable and some of the effects of this will be irreversible.
The officials argue that the emphasis must now switch from trying to avoid hitting 1.5 degrees to limiting the extent and duration of the overshoot. They insist that new policies and technologies will be needed to halt the rise and begin a rapid reversal toward the 1.5-degree target.
The UNEP executive director Inger Andersen stated plainly that there are no good outcomes if the world remains above 1.5 degrees of warming, appealing to governments to step up climate action and calling for an overshoot of ambition to make any breach as small and short as possible. The goal of limiting average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, before fossil fuel use accelerated, was set in the 2015 Paris Agreement and signed by almost all of the worlds countries.
The year 2024 was the first year the threshold was exceeded every month, but until a long-term exceedance was recorded, the UN held that the agreement was not breached. The newly published limiting overshoot report says that exceedance is inevitable in the next few years, pushing climate risks and impacts to increasingly dangerous heights.
The overshoot is expected to last several decades, with the most optimistic scenario, assuming behaviours change immediately and dramatically, marking a temperature rise kept to 1.8 degrees. A reversal to 1.6 degrees could then be possible by the end of the century.
However, the reports authors caution that most scenarios predict a rise of more than 2 degrees, and a return to or below 1.5 degrees remains uncertain. Even if a return to below 1.5 degrees is secured, many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions. Worsening extreme weather, ecosystem destruction, and the loss of small islands and low-lying coastal cities are anticipated.
Severe damage to human health, food security, water supplies, nature, cities, infrastructure, and economies is expected. Irreversible impacts include glacier loss and catastrophes such as the recent landslides in Nepal. There are also concerns about the potential disruption of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
One scientist involved in the report noted that the science was not radically new but was expressed in a more unfiltered way than usual, because the report was not subject to line-by-line approval by UN member states, some of whom have an interest in retaining fossil fuels. He observed that nothing really kept the world at 1.5 degrees, noting that warming continues at 0.2 to 0.3 degrees centigrade per decade and global emissions continue to rise year on year, albeit more slowly.
Even with the most optimistic scenarios of emissions reductions, he warned, the world is passing 1.5 degrees, and the key question is how far past and for how long temperatures might stay above that threshold, a picture that is not looking good
Climate Change Global Warming Paris Agreement United Nations 1.5 Degrees
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