![]() ![]() Concerns that the United States would seek to obstruct the process proved unfounded. The report was approved by consensus as soon as the Saudis backed down, participants told AFP. The week-long meeting in Incheon, South Korea - already deep into overtime - deadlocked on Saturday when oil giant Saudi Arabia demanded the deletion of a passage noting the need for global CO2 emissions to decline “well before 2030”. The IPCC report was timed to feed into the December UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland, where world leaders will be under pressure to ramp up national carbon-cutting pledges which - even if fulfilled - would yield a 3C world. “The problem isn’t going to be solved with a silver bullet,” Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, told AFP. The path to a climate-safe world has become a tightrope, and will require an unprecedented marshalling of human ingenuity, the authors said. That amount, however, must be weighed against the even steeper cost of inaction, the report says. Limiting global warming to 1.5C comes with a hefty price tag: some USD 2.4 trillion (2.1 trillion euros) of investments in the global energy system every year between 20, or about 2.5 per cent of world GDP. “We have only the slimmest of opportunities remaining to avoid unthinkable damage to the climate system that supports life as we know it,” said Amjad Abdulla, chief negotiator at UN climate talks for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). The stakes are especially high for small island states, developing nations in the tropics, and countries with densely-populated delta regions already suffering from rising seas. “Is it fair for the next generation to pay to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere that we are now putting into it?”, asked Allen. But the scheme would need to plant an area twice the size of India in biofuel crops, and assumest hat some 1,200 billion tonnes of CO2 - 30 years’ worth of emissions at current rates - can be safely locked away underground. It depends heavily on the use of biofuels. A contrasting “pay later” scenario compensates for a high-consumption lifestyles and continued use of fossil fuels with a temporary breaching of the 1.5C ceiling. It would also avoid an “overshoot” of the 1.5C threshold. The most ambitious would see a radical drawdown in energy consumption coupled with a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and a swift decline in CO2 emissions starting in 2020. Drawing from more than 6,000 recent scientific studies, the report laid out four pathways to that goal. “That means every tonne of CO2 we put into the atmosphere will have to be balanced by a tonne of CO2 taken out,” said lead coordinating author Myles Allen, head of the University of Oxford’s Climate Research Programme. To have at least a 50/50 chance of staying under the 1.5C cap without overshooting the mark, the world must, by 2050, become “carbon neutral”, according to the report. ![]() “Things that scientists have been saying would happen further in the future are happening now,” Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, told AFP. ![]() The IPCC report, however, shows that global warming impacts have come sooner and hit harder than predicted. “Now it is over to governments - it’s their responsibility to act on it.” Before the Paris Agreement was inked in 2015, nearly a decade of scientific research rested on the assumption that 2C was the guardrail for a climate-safe world. ![]()
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