Even if all of the national pledges included in the Paris Agreement on climate change were reached, the world could hit 2 degrees of global warming by 2050, a group of climate scientists said in a report Thursday. “Global GHG emissions are not projected to decrease fast enough, even if all the pledges are fully implemented. Full implementation of the pledges will require the promised US$100 billion per year in financial assistance for developing countries to be realized. As a result, the 1.5°C target could be reached by the early 2030s and the 2°C target by 2050,” the report says.
The Paris Agreement establishes a legal framework under which nations are to pursue domestically developed climate action goals. Those Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) were submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ahead of the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the UNFCCC in December 2015, during which the agreement was adopted. A total of 162 parties, covering 189 countries representing 98 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, submitted pledges.
Even if every one of those pledges, some of which are conditional on outside funding, is met, global GHG emissions would be about 54 GtCO2-eq, according to the report. “The difference between the projected level of global GHG emissions in 2030 and what they should be to stay below 2°C, or the emissions gap, is 14 GtCO2-eq (range 12-17), or 33 percent above the 2°C pathway,” the report says.
