Tag: 1.5C

Counting on … day 64

12th March 2024

A Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) is a climate action plan that shows how a nation will cut its emissions and adapt to climate change. (Being nationally determined allows for differentiation between nations according to the current ability to effect change. Wealthier countries should be able to reduce emissions at a faster rate). 

Each Party – ie nation or state – to the Paris Agreement is required to establish an NDC.  Collectively these NDCs should ensure the world’s greenhouse gas emissions peak and then fall, and so address the climate crisis. Each NDC covers a five year period – being submitted to the UNFCC in 2020, 2025, 2030 etc – but is subject to ongoing review by each nation.

Since 2021 the UNFCC has produced a synthesis report that collects, collates and analyses all the NDCs, to determine whether or not nations are on track to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. The most recent, published in November 2023 in the run up to COP28, found that the  national climate action plans were still insufficient to limit the global temperature rise to just 1.5C. The hope was that this announcement would spur on the parties at COP28 to take radical action to address this shortcoming.

However it did not.

Counting on … day 50

21st February 2024

1.5C is the level of warming within which we should be trying to stay if we are to avoid an unbearably worse deterioration of the global climate. This figure is the product of over 6,000 scientific references, and was prepared by 91 authors from 40 countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Global_Warming_of_1.5_°C

This is not to say that even with global warming at 1.5C there won’t be adverse effects. The extreme hot summer temperatures, floods, wild fires, droughts, and storms that we have experienced over the last few years will now be the norm. Glaciers, sea ice and ice caps will continue to melt and disappear, causing rivers to dry up in the summer, and elsewhere raising sea levels. The change in climate is already altering natural habitats reducing numbers of plants, birds, animals, insects etc, and having similar adverse effects on agriculture. Food and water security are already being threatened. Warming oceans is reducing marine life. All this will increase as temperatures rise.

Each fraction of a degree of further global warming  will accentuate these problems for all life forms. The charts show  how much greater would be the effects of 2C warming over 1.5C.