The World’s Best Hope to Beat Climate Change Is Vanishing

To limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels — a threshold seen as crucial to avoid more severe impacts on people and ecosystems — the world’s annual emissions need to fall 42% by 2030, the UN Environment Programme says.

Emissions rose 1.3% in 2023, and need to decline 7.5% every year until 2035 to meet the target to limit planetary heating.

Gains being made in the developed world to cut emissions aren’t currently sufficient to shift the global trajectory, as emerging nations produce an increasingly large carbon footprint. International ambitions may rest on whether economic growth can be decoupled from the burning of fossil fuels.

A group of 10 major developed nations — including the US, Japan and Germany — reduced emissions 4.2% in 2023, cutting their footprint to the lowest level since 1970, according to Fitch Ratings. Among 10 key emerging economies the total rose 4.7%.

Energy consumption is growing rapidly in developing nations, and most have power systems that remain far more reliant on polluting coal and gas. India, already the second-largest coal consuming nation, will add electricity demand faster than any other major economy through 2026, the IEA forecasts.

Spending on renewables to decarbonize power systems remains modest outside existing major hubs. China’s investment totalled $130 billion in the first half of 2024, compared to $2.9 billion across Southeast Asia and $15.6 billion in Latin America, according to BNEF. Developing nations aim to use the COP29 negotiations in Baku to demand a huge increase in the flow of climate finance from rich countries to more than $1 trillion a year.

Countries are also being pressed to dramatically increase the ambition shown in their nationally determined contributions — the commitments governments make under the Paris Agreement to cut emissions. A failure to upgrade targets in a new round of pledges — and to deliver immediate progress — risks temperature increases of 2.6C to 3.1C this century, the UNEP said last month.

Nations that have already hit a pollution peak still need to do more to narrow the gap between existing carbon-cutting plans and what’s needed to limit warming to 1.5C. The US needs to make an additional 17% reduction by 2030 to be fully aligned, according to the Network for Greening the Financial System. Though emissions declined during Trump’s first term, there’s little hope that climate policies will be accelerated.

“Everybody should be seeing the opportunity of moving forward — this is a race,” says Catherine McKenna, a former environment and climate minister of Canada, and who led a UN expert group focused on emissions reduction efforts by cities, companies and other non-governmental polluters.