Worldwide climate protection based on national plans that are regularly improved – this is what the Paris Climate Agreement provides. The system actually works, says Patricia Espinosa, head of the UN climate secretariat. 113 countries have submitted new plans for how they want to proceed in the fight against global warming. 70 of them are aiming for climate neutrality. “That’s the good side,” said Espinosa on Friday when she presented the latest report on the national plans. “But while we are making progress in some states, greenhouse gas emissions are going in the wrong direction.”
According to the calculations, they will continue to rise, and by 2030 they could be 16 percent higher than in 2010. According to the latest results of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world would be moving in the direction of around 2.7 degrees warming, much more than had actually been agreed. The world is moving away from the climate target instead of moving closer to it. “That breaks the promise made six years ago to pursue the 1.5 degrees Celsius target of the Paris Agreement,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres. Every failure is “measured in the massive loss of life and livelihood”.
Even those countries that have submitted new plans only project a decrease in emissions of twelve percent by 2030. However, in order to stabilize global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the decrease would have to be 45 percent according to figures from the IPCC . Even for a stop of warming at two degrees a minus of 25 percent would be necessary; but at most those states that want to achieve climate neutrality like the EU are on schedule.
Climate protection aid for developing countries is also still far behind schedule
The main purpose of the report is to prepare for the climate conference in Glasgow at the beginning of November. Actually, all states should submit new plans by then, but there is no trace of them from countries like China and India. Some developing countries, on the other hand, link climate protection with aid from the developed world. But on this front too, there is bad news this Friday.
After all, the industrialized countries are still more than 20 billion euros away from the 100 billion dollars that the Paris Agreement promised annually to developing countries. This emerges from a new report that the OECD industrialized and emerging countries group presented on Friday. Accordingly, a total of 79.6 billion dollars in public and private climate protection funds flowed into the pot in 2019. That is only two percent more than in the previous year. Worse still, this growth came only through multilateral development banks. The bilateral commitments by states declined, as did the private investments that this triggered. Even new commitments, such as those made by Germany, Great Britain and the USA, could not prevent the decline.
“Disappointing,” said OECD Secretary General Mathias Cormann. Numbers for 2020 will not be available until the beginning of next year. But it is already clear that the means are lagging behind the goal. Only recently, the German Secretary of State for the Environment, Jochen Flasbarth, was commissioned to tackle the billion-euro gap together with Canada’s Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson – until the climate conference. Failure to do this could put a strain on the conference. “It is a central question of trust,” said UN Secretary General Guterres.