Government plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions aren’t enough to avoid catastrophic global warming, with the planet on track to heat up between 2.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius by the end of the century compared with preindustrial times, according to a new report from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Despite some progress in the last year, governments need to do more by 2030 to ensure that the global temperature increase is below 2 degrees and ideally closer to 1.5 degrees — the goal set in the Paris Agreement reached in 2015. The UNFCCC reached its conclusions by analyzing all national climate plans, also known as nationally-determined contributions or NDCs, submitted since 2015.
"The good news — projections show emissions won’t be increasing after 2030,” U.N. climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told reporters on Wednesday. "The bad news — they’re still not demonstrating the rapid downward trend scientists say is necessary this decade.”