9 Years After the Paris Agreement, the UN Confronts the World’s Failure to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

From our collaborating partner Living on Earth, public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering with Bob Berwyn, who covers climate science and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for Inside Climate News. 

As the world prepares for the United Nations’ climate treaty summit, COP29 in Azerbaijan, in less than two weeks, a trio of scientific reports is warning that we are headed for a destructive 3 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels.

That’s a far cry from the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.

With 1.3 degrees of average warming so far, our planetary fever is already spawning more catastrophic storms, heatwaves and sea level rise.

To meet the Paris goal, the world needs to cut global warming emissions by nearly half by 2030, and so far we are way off track.

The continued burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forests now has greenhouse gas emissions higher than ever, and the current plans of the 198 nations in the treaty add up to only a paltry emissions reduction of 2.6 percent.

Bob Berwyn, who follows climate negotiations for our media partner, Inside Climate News, explains what’s required to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

BOB BERWYN: The annual reductions needed now are about 7.5 percent a year, and we’re very far away from that. Each year that it doesn’t drop, that percentage cut gets bigger and bigger, so we’re sort of slipping away. One of the most interesting things in the three reports was a comment from senior United Nations officials who acknowledged—one of the first times that I’ve seen it in writing from the UN—that the 1.5 degree goal may not be reachable. 

JENNI DOERING: This 2.5 percent projected emissions reduction by 2030 is where the world is headed collectively. To what extent are certain countries pulling more weight? Who is actually on track to make the most impact? 

BERWYN: Probably have to single out Europe, which has decreased its emissions by about 32.5 percent since 1990, and so is really on track to meet that 40 percent to 50 percent emissions cut by 2030. And they have, in the last couple of years, even toyed with setting a more ambitious target of 50 to 55 percent reductions by 2030. 

DOERING: Hearing about this gap between where we need to be in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and where we’re headed at the moment, I imagine some people may be feeling a bit cynical about the efficacy of the UNFCCC right now. Some might even say, why keep having these meetings if we’re so far off the mark? What’s your response to that? 

BERWYN: My response is that the UNFCCC process did deliver the Paris Climate Agreement, which 198 countries agreed to. I suppose, going into COP29 you can say it’s good that we still have 198 countries at the table talking about this and at least in principle, agreeing that it’s important and that something needs to be done. 

At COP28 last year, we had a statement about transitioning away from fossil fuels, finally. That was COP28, so that was after 27 years of climate summits. And it’s not very specific, but it was hailed as a huge success. And there are studies out there showing that emissions globally would probably be higher, quite a bit higher, if we didn’t have these global climate talks ongoing since the early 1990s. So they have managed something. I mean, think about it, we might already be at two degrees warming now, instead of 1.2 degrees, if we hadn’t initiated these efforts. 

If you look back to the Kyoto Protocol in the early 2000s, which set legally binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, some countries took that really seriously. I’m going to use Europe as an example, again, because I’m based here, and I’m a bit familiar with it. They took the goals of the Kyoto Protocol and started working on them right away. And even when it fell apart, they said, well, this isn’t our interest, and we’re going to continue on this path. 

And so now they’re sort of set to meet these next level climate targets that come from the Paris Agreement. I think that shows the benefit of persistence and incremental efforts and incremental improvements. 

At the same time, things are getting worse fast, and it really is a climate emergency, a climate crisis, if you will. We’ve seen that in the last few months in so many different ways. So there needs to be an urgency, too. And I’m afraid that people will say, well, “OK, well, then shoot, we’ll just aim for 2 degrees,” and wow, that gives us a few more decades to ease off, and hopefully invent some new technology that will help get us out of this mess.

DOERING: You mentioned that one of these reports grappled with the very real possibility that the world will overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming at some point. What happens if we go past that point?

BERWYN: There’s still lots of scientific discussion about what happens at those different levels of warming, but one thing is for sure, that the impacts from these increases are incremental. Some of these numbers don’t sound like that much—the difference between 1.5 and 1.6—but we know now, from climate science done just in the last few years, that small increments of warming make heatwaves worse by magnitudes. A few tenths of a degree in warmer ocean temperatures loads up hurricanes with that much more moisture, makes that much more rainfall and can make the wind stronger as well, and so the impacts don’t increase by these tiny increments. They’re magnified many times over. 

Each time the increment goes up a little bit, we still have to do everything we can to limit warming, because 1.5 isn’t just sort of a trap door where everything changes all at once. It gets worse with every tenth of a degree, and so if you can’t stop warming at 1.5 degrees, it’s better to stop it at 1.6 or 1.7 as soon as we possibly can.

DOERING: We’re speaking on the eve of the U.S. presidential election. What’s the mood like in the international community about how this election might shape the next few years, or even decades of global climate action?

BERWYN: I’d say that there’s a pretty wide range of reactions from different parts of the world. With close trade partners like Europe, where we’ve shared a somewhat common climate policy, there’s great concern that the election outcome will affect what happens over the next few years. It’s pretty clear from the candidates in the U.S., their positions on energy and so forth, that a Republican win would probably result in more emissions, and a Democratic win would result in continued reductions, at least moderate, and maybe more. 

In other parts of the world, I spoke with a couple of climate economists in Africa over the last few months, and they don’t really have as big a stake in it as some other regions of the world. Some of the comments I heard were, “Well, the U.S. doesn’t really have any cohesive strategy or climate interests in Africa, other than perhaps getting minerals for the energy transition.” So they didn’t feel that the outcome would have a really direct, strong effect on them. 

They may be right or they may be wrong, depending on what happens. But one overriding sense that I got is that the world is pretty used to the U.S. reversing course on climate policy every now and then. I mean, the U.S. is the only country that’s pulled out of the Paris Agreement, then rejoined. It also refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. And so I don’t think a reversal of U.S. course would be a big surprise to a lot of people. 

And there’s a consensus that the rest of the world is going to truck along and continue.The global climate effort will definitely be slowed; it can be delayed by U.S. non-participation. But the rest of the world, with the exception of a few other countries, is going to keep trying to do this because the nations all know that it’s critical and that it’s in their own interest to do it. In fact, some climate economists said that the U.S. runs the risk of ending up like a rusty locomotive on a railroad siding in terms of the energy transition. It’s going to leave the U.S. isolated at some point in a world that has moved on beyond fossil fuels.

DOERING: Bob Berwyn is a reporter with our media partner Inside Climate News, based in Austria. Thank you so much, Bob. 

BERWYN: You’re very welcome.