How about we talk about solutions? At a time when the war in Ukraine is highlighting economies addicted to hydrocarbons, the world is looking at scenarios that can help limit global warming and avoid going blindly towards climate catastrophe.
“We are walking with our eyes closed towards climate catastrophe”
After more than a century and a half of development focusing on fossil fuels, the planet has gained approximately +1.1°C on average compared to the pre-industrial era, already multiplying heat waves, droughts, storms or devastating floods.
The warning issued Monday by the Secretary General of the United Nations just before the opening of two weeks of negotiations by UN climate experts (IPCC) is more striking than ever.
“We are walking with our eyes closed towards climate catastrophe” and “if we continue like this, we can say goodbye to the 1.5°C objective. That of 2°C could also be out of reach”, declared Antonio Guterres, the secretary general of the UN, in reference to the objectives of the Paris agreement.
The dependence of the world’s economies on fossil fuels is “madness”
The dependence of the world’s economies on fossil fuels is “madness”, he insisted, in a video message during a conference organized by The Economist.
Some 200 states began consideration on Monday of the IPCC’s new report on solutions to reduce emissions, which is due to be released on April 4 after two weeks of heated discussions online and behind closed doors.
In the first part of its report published in August 2021, the IPCC pointed to the acceleration of global warming, predicting that the threshold of +1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era – the most ambitious objective of the agreement of Paris- could be reached already around 2030.
The second, at the end of February, painted a grim picture of past, present and future impacts on people and ecosystems, pointing out that delaying action reduced the chances of a “liveable future”.
Third part on possible ways to curb global warming
The third opus will look at the possible ways to slow down global warming, by breaking down the possibilities by major sectors (energy, transport, industry, agriculture, etc.), without forgetting the questions of social acceptability and the place of technologies such as capture and carbon storage.
“We are talking about a large-scale transformation of all the major systems: energy, transport, infrastructure, buildings, agriculture and food,” climate economist Céline Guivarch, one of the authors of the report, told AFP. .
“This is a crucial report released at a crucial time”
Major transformations that must be “triggered now” if we want to be able to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, she added.
These questions, which affect the very organization of our ways of life, consumption and production, risk giving rise to heated discussions during these two weeks when the 195 States will sift through line by line, word by word, the “summary for decision-makers”, a kind of summary of the thousands of pages of the scientific report.
In a context made even more “flammable” by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, notes Alden Meyer, analyst at the E3G think tank, who expects to speak about the conflict.
On the climate front, he hopes that “in the long term” this war will “give more momentum and impetus to the need to get out of gas and oil in general”.
“This is a crucial report published at a crucial time when states, companies and investors are recalibrating their plans to accelerate the rapid exit from fossil fuels and the transition to sustainable and more resilient food systems”, comments Kaisa. Kosonen from Greenpeace.
While according to the UN, the current commitments of the States, if they were respected, would lead to a “catastrophic” warming of +2.7°C, the signatories of the Paris agreement are called upon to strengthen their ambitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the UN climate conference COP27 in Egypt in November.
But after a COP26 that ended with “naive optimism”, for Antonio Guterres, the war in Ukraine could conversely derail climate action even more. With policies to replace Russian hydrocarbons that risk “creating a long-term dependence on fossils, and making it impossible to limit warming to +1.5°”, an objective today “in critical care”.