The state of the planet in 10 numbers
A snapshot of the warming world, from sea level rise
to fossil fuel subsidies.
Ricardo
Tomás for POLITICO
BY CHELSEA
HARVEY AND ZIA WEISE
NOVEMBER
20, 2023 6:00 AM CET
The COP28
climate summit comes at a critical moment for the planet.
A summer
that toppled heat records left a trail of disasters around the globe. The world
may be just six years away from breaching the Paris Agreement’s temperature
target of 1.5 degrees Celsius, setting the stage for much worse calamities to
come. And governments are cutting their greenhouse gas pollution far too slowly
to head off the problem — and haven’t coughed up the billions of dollars they
promised to help poorer countries cope with the damage.
This year’s
summit, which starts on Nov. 30 in Dubai, will conclude the first assessment of
what countries have achieved since signing the Paris accord in 2015.
To help
understand the stakes, here’s a snapshot of the state of the planet — and
global climate efforts — in 10 numbers.
1.3 degrees Celsius
Global warming since the preindustrial era
Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have been
driving global temperatures skyward since the 19th century, when the industrial
revolution and the mass burning of fossil fuels began to affect the Earth’s
climate. The world has already warmed by about 1.3 degrees Celsius, or 2.3
degrees Fahrenheit, and most of that warming has occurred since the 1970s. In
the last 50 years, research suggests, global temperatures have risen at their
fastest rate in at least 2,000 years.
This past
October concluded the Earth’s hottest 12-month span on record, a recent
analysis found. And 2023 is virtually certain to be the hottest calendar year
ever observed. It’s continuing a string of recent record-breakers — the world’s
five hottest years on record have all occurred since 2015.
Allowing
warming to pass 2 degrees Celsius would tip the world into catastrophic
changes, scientists have warned, including life-threatening heat extremes,
worsening storms and wildfires, crop failures, accelerating sea level rise and
existential threats to some coastal communities and small island nations. Eight
years ago in Paris, nearly every nation on Earth agreed to strive to keep
temperatures well below that threshold, and under a more ambitious 1.5-degree
threshold if at all possible.
But with
just fractions of a degree to go, that target is swiftly approaching — and many
experts say it’s already all but out of reach.
$4.3 trillion
Global economic losses from climate disasters since
1970
Climate-related disasters are worsening as
temperatures rise. Heat waves are intensifying, tropical cyclones are
strengthening, floods and droughts are growing more severe and wildfires are
blazing bigger. Record-setting events struck all over the planet this year, a
harbinger of new extremes to come. Scientists say such events will only
accelerate as the world warms.
Nearly
12,000 weather, climate and water-related disasters struck worldwide over the
last five decades, the World Meteorological Organization reports. They’ve
caused trillions of dollars in damage, and they’ve killed more than 2 million
people.
Ninety
percent of these deaths have occurred in developing countries. Compared with
wealthier nations, these countries have historically contributed little to the
greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming – yet they disproportionately
suffer the impacts of climate change.
4.4 millimeters
Annual rate of sea level rise
Global sea levels are rapidly rising as the ice sheets
melt and the oceans warm and expand. Scientists estimate that they’re now
rising by about 4.4 millimeters, or about 0.17 inches, each year – and that
rate is accelerating, increasing by about 1 millimeter every decade.
Those sound
like small numbers. They’re not.
The world’s
ice sheets and glaciers are losing a whopping 1.2 trillion tons of ice each
year. Those losses are also speeding up, accelerating by at least 57 percent
since the 1990s. Future sea level rise mainly depends on future ice melt, which
depends on future greenhouse gas emissions. With extreme warming, global sea
levels will likely rise as much as 3 feet by the end of this century, enough to
swamp many coastal communities, threaten freshwater supplies and submerge some
small island nations.
Some places
are more vulnerable than others.
“Low-lying
islands in the Pacific are on the frontlines of the fight against sea level
rise,” said NASA sea level expert Benjamin Hamlington. “In the U.S., the
Southeast and Gulf Coasts are experiencing some of the highest rates of sea
level rise in the world and have very high future projections of sea
level.”
But in the
long run, he added, “almost every coastline around the world is going to
experience sea level rise and will feel impacts.”
Less than 6 years
When the world could breach the 1.5-degree threshold
The world is swiftly running out of time to meet its
most ambitious international climate target: keeping global warming below 1.5
degrees Celsius. Humans can emit only another 250 billion metric tons of carbon
dioxide and maintain at least even odds of meeting that goal, scientists say.
That
pollution threshold could arrive in as little as six years.
That’s the
bottom line from at least two recent studies, one published in June and one in
October. Humans are pouring about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere each year, with each ton eating into the margin of error.
The size of
that carbon buffer is smaller than previous estimates have suggested,
indicating that time is running out even faster than expected.
“While our
research shows it is still physically possible for the world to remain below
1.5C, it's difficult to see how that will stay the case for long,” said Robin
Lamboll, a scientist at Imperial College London and lead author of the most
recent study. “Unfortunately, net-zero dates for this target are rapidly
approaching, without any sign that we are meeting them.”
43 percent
How much greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 2030 to
hit the temperature target
The world would have to undergo a stark transformation
during this decade to have any hope of meeting the Paris Agreement’s ambitious
1.5-degree cap.
In a
nutshell, global greenhouse gas emissions have to fall 43 percent by 2030, and
60 percent by 2035, before reaching net-zero by mid-century, according to a
U.N. report published in September on the progress the world has made since
signing the Paris Agreement. That would give the world a 50 percent chance of
limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees.
But based
on the climate pledges that countries have made to date, greenhouse gas
emissions are likely to fall by just 2 percent this decade, according to a U.N.
assessment published this month.
Governments
are “taking baby steps to avert the climate crisis,” U.N. climate chief Simon
Stiell said in a statement this month. “This means COP28 must be a clear
turning point.”
$1 trillion a year
Climate funding needs of developing countries
In many ways, U.N. climate summits are all about
finance. Cutting industries’ carbon pollution, protecting communities from
extreme weather, rebuilding after climate disasters — it all costs money. And
developing countries, in particular, don’t have enough of it.
As
financing needs grow, pressure is mounting on richer nations such as the U.S.
that have produced the bulk of planet-warming emissions to help developing
countries cut their own pollution and adapt to a warmer world. They also face
growing calls to pay for the destruction wrought by climate change, known as
loss and damage in U.N.-speak.
But the
flow of money from rich to poor countries has slowed. In October, a pledging
conference to replenish the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund raised only $9.3 billion,
even less than the $10 billion that countries had promised last time. An
overdue promise by developed countries to deliver $100 billion a year by 2020
to help developing countries reduce emissions and adapt to rising temperatures
was “likely” met last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development said this month, while warning that adaptation finance had fallen
by 14 percent in 2021.
As a
result, the gap between what developing countries need and how much money is
flowing in their direction is growing. The OECD report said developing
countries will need around $1 trillion a year for climate investments by 2025,
“rising to roughly $2.4 trillion each year between 2026 and 2030.”
$7 trillion
Worldwide fossil fuel subsidies in 2022
In stark contrast to the trickle of climate finance,
fossil fuel subsidies have surged in recent years. In 2022, total spending on
subsidies for oil, natural gas and coal reached a record $7 trillion, the
International Monetary Fund said in August. That’s $2 trillion more than in
2020.
Explicit
subsidies — direct government support to reduce energy prices — more than
doubled since 2020, to $1.3 trillion. But the majority of subsidies are
implicit, representing the fact that governments don’t require fossil fuel
companies to pay for the health and environmental damage that their products
inflict on society.
At the same
time, countries continue pumping public and private money into fossil fuel
production. This month, a U.N. report found that governments plan to produce
more than twice the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent
with the 1.5-degree target.
66,000 square kilometers
Gross deforestation worldwide in 2022
At the COP26 climate summit two years ago in Glasgow,
Scotland, nations committed to halting global deforestation by 2030. A total of
145 countries have signed the Glasgow Forest Declaration, representing more
than 90 percent of global forest cover.
Yet global
action is still falling short of that target. The annual Forest Declaration
Assessment, produced by a collection of research and civil society
organizations, estimated that the world lost 66,000 square kilometers of forest
last year, or about 25,000 square miles — a swath of territory slightly larger
than West Virginia or Lithuania. Most of that loss came from tropical forests.
Halting
deforestation is a critical component of global climate action. The U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that collective contributions
from agriculture, forestry and land use compose as much as 21 percent of global
human-caused carbon emissions. Deforestation releases large volumes of carbon
dioxide back into the atmosphere, and recent research suggests that carbon
losses from tropical forests may have doubled since the early 2000s.
Almost 1 billion tons
The annual carbon dioxide removal gap
Given the world’s slow pace in reducing greenhouse gas
pollution, scientists say a second approach is essential for slowing the
Earth’s warming — removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The
technology for doing this is largely untested at scale, and won’t be
cheap.
A landmark
report on carbon dioxide removals led by the University of Oxford earlier this
year found that keeping warming to 2 degrees Celsius or less would require
countries to collectively remove an additional 0.96 billion tons of
CO2-equivalent a year by 2030.
About 2
billion tons are now removed every year, but that is largely achieved through
the natural absorption capacity of forests.
Removing
even more carbon will require countries to massively scale up carbon removal
technologies, given the limited capacity of forests to absorb more carbon
dioxide.
Carbon
removal technologies are in the spotlight at COP28, though some countries and
companies want to use them to meet net-zero while continuing to burn fossil
fuels. Scientists have been clear that carbon removal cannot be a substitute
for steep emissions cuts.
1,000 gigawatts
Annual growth in renewable power capacity needed to
keep 1.5 degrees in reach
The shift from fossil fuels to renewables is underway,
but the transition is still far too slow to meet the Paris Agreement targets.
To keep 1.5
degrees within reach, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that
the world needs to add 1,000 gigawatts in renewable energy capacity every year
through 2030. By comparison, the United States’ entire utility-scale
electricity-generation capacity was about 1,160 gigawatts last year, according
to the Department of Energy.
Last year,
countries added about 300 gigawatts, according to the agency’s latest World
Energy Transitions Outlook published in June.
That
shortfall has prompted the EU and the climate summit’s host nation, the United
Arab Emirates, to campaign for nations to sign up to a target to triple the
world’s renewable capacity by 2030 at COP28, a goal also supported by the U.S.
and China.
“The
transition to clean energy is happening worldwide and it’s unstoppable,”
International Energy Agency boss Fatih Birol said last month. “It’s not a
question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ – and the sooner the better
for all of us.”
This
article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM. The
article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and
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