The goal of the Paris climate change agreement, to keep global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit that temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, is a gallant pursuit, but it’s just words until nations come up with a real plan to reach it, according to a research perspective published Thursday in Nature.
“Even starting today, limiting warming to no more than 2 °C relative to pre-industrial levels constitutes a societal challenge; at the same time, the warming projected from current [intended nationally determined contributions] constitutes an important challenge on its own in terms of coping with climate impacts,” the perspective says.
The agreement includes a further goal of peaking global emissions as soon as possible. “Both targets are in principle consistent with the temperature objective of the Agreement, but beg the broader question of whether current INDCs are already putting the world on a path towards achieving them,” the authors wrote in the perspective, in which they conducted a comprehensive review of the pledges made in the agreement as well as of other reviews which have been conducted since.
It should be no surprise that the current INDCs do not put the world on a path to a 2-degree future. This fact has long been acknowledged, even through the negotiation process for the Paris Agreement, and is the basis for the inclusion of a “ratcheting” mechanism in the deal that requires INDCs to be increased in ambition every five years. In short, the INDCs currently on the table are not the final INDCs.
The editorial was penned by international researchers Joeri Rogelj, Michel den Elzen, Niklas Höhne, Taryn Fransen, Hanna Fekete, Harald Winkler, Roberto Schaeffer, Fu Sha, Keywan Riahi, and Malte Meinshausen.
