Inspired by a wave of climate activism, national leaders were expected to come up with new, more ambitious plans to cut emissions over the next decade.
The COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, would be the first real test of their determination to do what they promised, under the historic Paris Agreement.
The coronavirus pandemic has derailed those plans, leaving some governments with a new excuse to stop. But Covid-19 certainly hasn’t stopped climate change.
The pandemic has also shown the world that major, previously unimaginable changes are possible.
Despite the global turmoil, several of the world’s top polluters have raised their long-term climate goals, putting the world within a very short distance of the Paris Agreement’s goal of reducing emissions and thus limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
Experts are cautiously optimistic.
“It is now recognized that when the world’s major economies think about it, they can step in and correct this market failure,” said Mike Davis, CEO of Global Witness, an NGO focused on human rights, climate and the environment. “We’ve seen this to some extent in response to Covid, and maybe that’s starting to dispel the myth that we’re essentially all slaves to the free market, [and] there is nothing we can do. ”
Devastating consequences
The effects of climate change will be more difficult than ever to ignore in 2020.
But global warming is only one aspect of the climate crisis.
“The main effects of climate change are being felt by drought, flooding, sea level rise, stronger tropical storms, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones, as well as the melting of the glaciers,” Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the WMO, told CNN.
In the first six months of this year, nearly 10 million people were displaced from their homes by disasters caused or exacerbated by climate change, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center in Geneva (IDMC). For some, the move was temporary, but many are facing long-term displacement.
India, Bangladesh and the Philippines were the three worst hit countries, with a total of more than 6 million displaced people.
Developing countries are often disproportionately hit by the impacts of climate change because of their location and lack of access to the funds and technologies that can help mitigate the effects.
But 2020 has shown that no country is immune from such disruption. Hundreds of thousands of people from some of the world’s richest countries were forced to leave their homes, lost their livelihoods – and sometimes their lives – to fires, storms and floods. In the first six months of the year alone, an estimated 53,000 people were displaced in the US and 51,000 more in Australia.
And wherever such disasters occur, the poorest still suffer the most, according to Alexandra Bilak of the IDMC.
“Even in high-income countries – in California, for example – there are people who had no access to insurance and who have lost everything, and they are the ones we are especially concerned about because they are the ones who will end up in very protracted situations which will increase their vulnerability, ”she said.
Glimmer of hope
The effects of climate change were devastating in 2020, but they could become even more disastrous if global warming continues in line with current trends.
The WMO says there is now at least a one in five chance that Earth’s average temperature will temporarily exceed pre-industrial levels by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2024 – a critical threshold in the Paris Agreement.
Under the agreement, most of the world agreed to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius – and aim for a temperature of 1.5 degrees.
“We are already warming up at 1.2 degrees and the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says that for the well-being of humanity and also for the well-being of the biosphere, the 1.5 degree target would be more favorable, ”Taalas said.
“With the 2 degree target, we would see more negative impacts from climate change, it would hurt global food production capacity, there would be plenty of coastal cities that would suffer from sea-level rise, and we would see more category 4 and 5 hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. “
Global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 if there is a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and by 25% of keeping it below 2 degrees. according to the IPCC.
The good news, Taalas said, is that we have both the technological and the economic means to achieve those goals. The bad news? Most countries still have no concrete plans to get there.
In order to meet the climate targets, emissions must decrease by at least the same amount every year over the next ten years – about 7.6%. There is a chance that this could happen.
“I think until recently everyone was pretty depressed about the way policies and actions developed in the field of climate change,” Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, told CNN.
Hare said there has been an understandable slowdown due to the pandemic: “ It seemed that political momentum was on the wane, but in the last six or eight weeks, especially since September when President Xi Jinping of China announced that China was on its way. was to net zero emissions. before 2060, the whole mood has changed. ”
South Africa, Japan, South Korea and Canada have all announced new net zero targets for 2050, following commitments from China, the EU and the UK.
According to an analysis by the Climate Action Tracker, these new pledges put the world within very close range of the Paris Agreement goal. The tracker, a collaboration between the NewClimate Institute and Climate Analytics, said current plans would translate into 2.1 degrees of warming by 2100.
But the new pledges are just that – promises to accomplish something three decades from now, when most of the current governments will long be gone.
“The acid test is whether countries will really take action in the short term by 2030,” Hare said.
The goals for 2050 and 2060 are steps in the right direction and should not be underestimated, but what really matters is what governments are doing now. The next decade will be the real make-or-break moment.