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UN: Nations well off-track of Paris climate agreement goals

New national plans designed to more aggressively combat climate change would hardly dent already dangerously high global temperature projections, according to a United Nations report published Tuesday.

The findings underscore the task at hand for nations as they prepare for COP30 climate negotiations that begin Nov. 10 in Brazil. The U.N. report showed nations are on a path that would bake in long-term changes to the planet such as more deadly heatwaves, runaway sea level rise and likelier extreme events like wildfires and droughts.

Temperatures would rise between 2.3 and 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial era levels by 2100 through policies governments included in their formal climate strategies last week, the annual U.N. emissions gap analysis found. That trajectory would far exceed the 2015 Paris climate agreement goals of keeping increases “well below” 2 C and the more ambitious 1.5 C mark.

“The bottom line is that nations have had three attempts to hit the mark with their Paris Agreement pledges, and each time they have landed off target,” the report said. “We still need unprecedented cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, in an ever-compressing timeframe, amid a challenging geopolitical context.”

While the pathway amounts to progress since the Paris climate agreement, when temperatures were headed for 4 C of warming, it still is far from enough, the report said. The U.N. reached the grim conclusion that multi-decadal temperature increase will surpass 1.5 C for the first time within the next decade.

Doing so would cross a critical political threshold. Nations have largely centered their strategies on avoiding that mark, citing dire predictions from a 2018 U.N. special report on climate science that warned of the enhanced likelihood of provoking irreversible climate “tipping points.”

“The Paris Agreement does not set a target date or expiration for its temperature goal. It is widely understood as a legal, moral and political obligation,” the report said, noting that, “[e]very fraction of a degree of global warming matters.”

Countries are actually falling further behind their original pledges: Nearly all the improvements — accounting for 0.1 C of warming — from the national plans submitted in 2020, when nations were on path for 2.6 to 2.8 C, are due to methodological changes. The United States’ second withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement under President Donald Trump would erase another 0.1 C of progress, the U.N. said.

Trump will exacerbate the issue as he sidelines the world’s largest economy and second-highest emitter. The U.N. found recent policy reversals would raise U.S. emissions by 1 gigaton through 2030, a significant increase compared to former President Joe Biden’s goal to cut U.S. emissions to roughly 3 gigatons that year.

Pollution trends are going in the wrong direction globally, the report states. Global greenhouse gases rose 2.3 percent from 2023 levels, far exceeding the 1.6 percent increase between 2022 and 2023 and four times faster than the average annual growth rate in the 2010s. Land-use change and deforestation drove emissions higher in 2024, combined with high fossil fuel consumption.

The U.N. said the goal is now to limit “overshoot” of 1.5 C — which acknowledges the reality that nations are heading north of the goal — and eventually reducing global temperatures. The report assessed a scenario with 66 percent likelihood of keeping that overshoot within 0.3 C and bringing temperatures back under 1.5 C by 2100.

But most nations are not even close to implementing all the policies for achieving their 2030 goals, with the world currently on pace for 2.8 C of warming. And just 60 parties to the Paris Agreement — not even one-third of the total — filed their nationally determined contributions, the national plans due every five years, by the Sept. 30 deadline. That already was months after the original February deadline.

G20 nations, which outside of African Union nations account for 77 percent of global greenhouse gases, must lead the way, the U.N. said. So far, just seven G20 members have finalized their latest NDCs while another three have announced informal targets. The G20 proposals are also lacking overall, as none strengthened their 2030 targets, the U.N. said.

“Accelerated mitigation action provides benefits and opportunities,” the report said, adding, “The new NDCs and current geopolitical situation do not provide promising signs that this will happen, but that is what countries and the multilateral processes must resolve to affirm collective commitment and confidence in achieving the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.”

LP Staff Writers

Writers at Lord’s Press come from a range of professional backgrounds, including history, diplomacy, heraldry, and public administration. Many publish anonymously or under initials—a practice that reflects the publication’s long-standing emphasis on discretion and editorial objectivity. While they bring expertise in European nobility, protocol, and archival research, their role is not to opine, but to document. Their focus remains on accuracy, historical integrity, and the preservation of events and individuals whose significance might otherwise go unrecorded.

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