United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres has warned that countries must scale up their efforts to fight the climate crisis to avoid a global catastrophe.
The UN boss stated that the window to take urgent climate action is closing rapidly.
Guterres’ comments come as a recent UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) Emissions Gap Report 2022 showed that under current Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the world is headed for 2.8 degrees of global heating by the end of the century.
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The Emissions Gap Report 2022 found that as climate impacts intensify, only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid an accelerating climate disaster. It looked at how to deliver this transformation through action in the electricity supply, industry, transport and buildings sectors, and the food and financial systems.
An NDC is a climate action plan to cut emissions and adapt to climate impacts. Each party to the Paris Agreement is required to establish an NDC and update it every five years. Despite a call for strengthened NDCs for 2030, UNEP’s report finds that progress since COP26 in Glasgow last year has been inadequate.
In his reaction, Guterres said that the recommendations in the report are clear as it will help countries end their reliance on fossil fuels and avoid a lock-in of new fossil fuel infrastructure as well as invest massively in renewables.
“Commitments to net zero are worth zero without the plans, policies and actions to back it up, the UN boss was quoted as saying. “Our world cannot afford any more greenwashing, fake movers or late movers and we must close the emissions gap before climate catastrophe closes in on us all”.
Guterres’ warning comes less than two weeks before the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), where global leaders are expected to discuss measures to be adopted in tackling the climate emergency – from building resilience and adapting to its impacts to financing climate action.
Story was adapted from Thisday.
