Most countries' climate plans 'totally inadequate' – experts

Extract from The Guardian

Climate change

US and Brazil unlikely to meet Paris agreement pledges - while Russia has not even made one

Damian Carrington Environment editor

@dpcarrington

Wed 6 Nov 2019 04.00 AEDT Last modified on Wed 6 Nov 2019 04.05 AEDT

Smoke and steam billows from Bełchatów power station in Poland, Europe’s largest coal-fired power plant. Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters

The world is on a path to climate disaster, with three-quarters of the commitments made by countries under the Paris agreement “totally inadequate”, according to a comprehensive expert analysis.
Four nations produce half of all carbon emissions but the US has gone into reverse in tackling the climate emergency under Donald Trump while Russia has failed to make any commitment at all.
Other major oil-producing nations, including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have set no targets to reduce emissions. China and India are cleaning up their energy systems but their surging economies mean emissions will continue to grow for a decade.
Under the 2015 Paris deal, countries agreed to limit global heating to 2C, or 1.5C if possible. Each country makes a voluntary pledge of climate action, but to date these would result in global temperatures rising by a disastrous 3-4C. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in 2018 that emissions, which are still rising, must fall by 50% by 2030 to be on track for 1.5C.
Only the 28 countries of the European Union and a few others including Norway, Switzerland and Ukraine are on track. Of the 184 national Paris pledges made, 136 are judged insufficient in the report, published by the Universal Ecological Fund.

Another problem is many pledges are unlikely to be met, due to the US withdrawing from the Paris agreement, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, reversing environmental policies, or because poorer nations do not get the funding they need – the US and Australia have stopped making such contributions.
“The current pledges made under the Paris agreement are totally inadequate to put us on a pathway to meet either the 1.5C or the 2C goal,” said the report’s author, Prof Sir Robert Watson, a former IPCC chair and scientific adviser to the UK and US governments. “With just 1C warming so far, we are already seeing some very significant effects. The effects at 3-4C will be very profound on people around the world.”
“When you see a country like Russia not even putting a pledge on the table, it is extremely disturbing,” he said. “Saudi Arabia and Russia rely heavily on their fossil fuels but that is no excuse. Those that have not effectively made any pledges yet really should be shamed into being part of the solution.”
Harvard University’s James McCarthy, a co-author of the report, said: “Failing to reduce emissions drastically and rapidly will result in an environmental and economic disaster from human-induced climate change.”
Failing to halve emissions by 2030 means the number of hurricanes, severe storms, wildfires and droughts are likely double in number and intensity, the scientists said, costing $2bn (£1,55bn) a day within a decade. To avoid this, the scale of climate change action must double or triple, they said.

The Paris agreement does allow for nations to ratchet up their commitments. “This report demonstrates we need to ratchet badly, and as quickly as possible,” said Watson.
China and India should be applauded for improving their energy systems, he said, but their emissions must peak. However, Watson said it was difficult to expect leadership from these nations when those with the biggest historical emissions, like the US, were not doing so.
The report concluded that countries that had pledged between 20-40% emission reductions by 2030 needed to do much better, including Australia, Canada and Japan.
“Leaders need to adopt new policies to close coal-fired power plants and promote renewable and carbon-free power sources such as wind, solar and hydropower,” said McCarthy. That means closing 2,400 coal-fired power stations around the world in the next decade and tackling the 250 new coal-powered units that are under construction.
Improved energy efficiency is also critical, said co-author Prof Nebojsa Nakicenovic, at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, potentially saving households around the world $500bn a year in energy bills.

From cars to homes to industry, he said, the potential of energy efficiency was so great that if implemented no extra energy would be required in 2030, despite the fact that global population was expected to be 1.2bn higher than today.