Member-only story
Global Emissions Must Drop 55 Percent by 2030 to Meet Climate Goals
The global emissions gap is growing when it needs to be shrinking
By Eillie Anzilotti
After three years of holding steady, global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.1 percent this year. Clearly, this is not good. In a significant report released this fall, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change illustrated the urgent need to rein in global warming, and to essentially decarbonize global industries by 2050. Even a slight increase in emissions is a setback (holding steady, at a level still very unhealthy for the planet, wasn’t great either, but it was at least progress).
It also contributed to a widening of what’s known as the “emissions gap“–essentially, the difference between “where we are and where we need to be.” Every year since 2011, the UN Environment Program has detailed the state of this global emissions gap. Doing so, though, is a bit like trying to hit a moving target. “There’s so much more information now, and so many more models and projections that we have to integrate into our study,” says Philip Drost, program officer at UN Environment. As climate science has grown more evolved, as matters of measuring emissions have become more sophisticated, and most crucially, as global warming goals have become more urgent, he adds, the gap has mutated.
This year, the IPCC report has raised the stakes of the emissions gap significantly, Drost says. Previous studies of the gap analyzed the effort required to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. The IPCC report called for adjusting that goal to 1.5 degrees Celsius to ensure the least possible environmental damage. Currently, nations have committed to climate action plans that are nowhere near aggressive enough to meet this heightened target. Under current commitments, we can expect to see around 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100–under which, according to another report, “preventing mass starvation will be as easy as halting the cycles of the moon.”
To keep the possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees in sight, global greenhouse gas emissions need to drop by 55 percent by 2030, according to the UN. Right now, total emissions hover around 53.5 gigatons of equivalent carbon dioxide. The gap…
