PARIS: The United Nations said on Wednesday the 1.5C target would be missed and outlined how global temperatures might be brought back down in a first-of-its-kind assessment met with dismay in climate-vulnernable nations.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres last year acknowledged the inevitability of overshooting 1.5C in the next few years but this assessment is the first by a UN agency to unambiguously state the target would be breached.
Scientists agree that warming above 1.5C relative to pre-industrial times poses grave risks and nearly 200 nations committed a decade ago to try and keep global temperature rises to this safer threshold.
But in a much-anticipated report involving dozens of scientists, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said the best remaining option had shifted “from avoiding overshoot to navigating it”.
“It’s a reality check. We have to live with this warmer world... but there’s still a lot we can do to limit warming,” said report co-author Richard Betts from the University of Exeter.
The report “was about responses rather than just sort of saying it is happening”, he told journalists.
Fellow author Debra Roberts said it was important for policymakers “to realise the rules of the game are now changing”.
“I think for me that’s the clarion call... we now have to reconfigure our climate governance around dealing with an overshoot pathway.
