COP26 President Alok Sharma warned before the Glasgow summit that any warming above two degrees would kill off all the world’s coral reefs and expose 2 billion people to extreme heatwaves.
“If temperatures continue to rise we will step through a series of one-way doors,the end destination of which is climate catastrophe.”
Tina Stege,climate envoy for the Marshall Islands,held a press conference to discuss the Climate Action Tracker report for the High Ambitions Coalition,a grouping of nations that has emerged as one of the more powerful blocs at the COP.
The coalition is backed by small island states and many vulnerable developing countries as well as much of Europe and the US.
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She said the report showed there must be a focus on 2030 rather than 2050 targets.
“2030 is the cliff edge,certainly for my country,a small island developing state,but really for the world,” she said.
Stege called for the conference to adopt a mechanism to make sure that national commitments were in line withthe overall 1.5 degree goal, and for countries like Australia that have not improved their 2030 commitment to be required to do so next year.
Two analyses published last week which took into account some of the pledges made on the COP sidelines - one by a University of Melbourne team and another by the International Energy Agency - found warming could peak beneath 2 degrees if all promises were kept.
Taryn Fransen,international climate change policy specialist with the World Resources Institute,said the wide variance in the projections reflected the different methodologies used.
The UN’s report is a meta-analysis of other reports including the one produced by Climate Action Tracker.
“All of these studies are using slightly different assumptions about which pledges they should include,” she said.
She said when you sift through the reports and “compare apples and apples”,a clearer picture emerges.
Analyses that cite a median warming figure based on 2030 targets project warming will reach a range of 2.4 degrees to 2.5 degrees. Those that include 2050 targets show warming being held just beneath 2 degrees.
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Those that are more conservative and predict a temperature we are unlikely to exceed,rather than a median temperature,arrive around at 2.7 degrees if they consider 2030 targets,and around 2.1 degrees if they include 2050 net zero targets.
The COP26 goal,according to its UK hosts,is to keep “1.5 alive”.
With three days until the meeting is due to close,that goal is not in reach.
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