The globally agreed target of 1.5C is on track to be missed. For those working to prevent disaster, the only option is to keep trying
The world is falling into an “abyss of risk”, said Prof Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Reports published this week by three UN agencies all point to the failure of governments to make – and keep – sufficient commitments to ensure that global temperatures will not rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which was the target in the 2015 Paris agreement. This is the worst possible news, and arrives just a week before this year’s round of climate talks, Cop27, is due to open in Egypt.
So far human activities have raised the temperature by around 1C on average. If current pledges on emissions are fulfilled, that figure is expected to rise to 2.5C. That would – and probably will – mean destruction on a scale that is hard to imagine, even after what we have already witnessed, most recently with devastating floods in Pakistan but also record-breaking heatwaves and other extreme weather elsewhere.
