• Joe Biden sees climate change as "an existential threat"

  • Summit The "Paris effect", five years later

The signing of the Treaty of Paris during the 2015 UN Climate Summit was one of the great milestones in the fight against climate change.

In the French capital, a roadmap was signed to drastically reduce CO2 emissions and limit the temperature increase at the end of the century to less than 2 ºC compared to the one at the beginning of the industrial era.

Climate science is a complex science, and it was soon found that the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set in Paris were insufficient to ensure that the temperature did not rise above 2ºC.

In 2017, a study based on statistical models concluded that with the current trend,

there was only a 5% chance that global warming would fall below 2 ° C by 2100.

The scientific community considers that

it would be desirable for warming to be limited to 1.5 ºC

in order to limit its consequences, which would be catastrophic for the population if the threshold of 2 ºC is exceeded due to excessive heat, droughts, extreme weather and the rise in sea level that it would bring.

For this reason, the UN has been pressuring the countries that signed the Treaty of Paris to commit to expanding their cut targets.

Achieving greater ambition was one of the main objectives of the Climate Summit held in Madrid in December 2019 and of the mini-summit that Paris hosted in December to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Treaty.

Now, the same authors from the University of Washington who signed that research have used the same statistical methods to try to answer a question: How much do we really have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit the warming of our planet to less than 2 ºC?

His conclusion is that we are far from achieving that goal.

According to his calculations, published this Tuesday in the journal

Communications Earth & Environment

, those cuts foreseen in the Paris Agreement would have to be nothing 80% more ambitious.

Specifically, the reduction in emissions should be on average 1.8% per year instead of 1% per year.

To make its estimates, the study took into account the national population, the gross domestic product per person and the so-called carbon intensity or emission intensity (the amount of carbon emitted by each economic or industrial activity).

Also in this new work, in which they have added five more years of data (collecting information from the period 1960-2015), the scientists agree that with the current objectives set in the Paris Agreement there is only a 5% chance that heating is below 2 ºC.

The US planned to reduce its emissions by 1% each year until 2026 while China maintains that it will reduce its carbon intensity by 60% in 2030 compared to the levels it had in 2005. In fact,

the authors recommend that countries review their commitments annually

, rather than on time scales of five, ten or more years as is currently done in many existing climate plans.

"Globally, the goal [of limiting warming to 2 ° C] requires 80% more reductions than agreed in Paris, but if a country has implemented most of its mitigation measures, the extra cut it would need to make would be smaller. "Peiran Liu, one of the study's lead authors, said in a statement.

Thus, the US would have to increase its CO2 reductions by 38%, China by 7% and the United Kingdom by 17%.

Other countries such as Brazil or South Korea, where emissions have risen, will have to make a bigger cut.

As detailed by Adrian Raftery, professor of Statistics at the University of Washington and leader of the study, between 2011 and 2015 the US experienced a drop in emissions due to efficiency in different industries such as transportation.

From their point of view, the economic changes linked to the Covid-19 pandemic will be short-lived, but

the creativity and flexibility that the coronavirus has required may usher in a lasting drop in emissions.

"

To a certain extent, the discourse on climate has been: 'We have to completely change our lifestyles and everything.

The idea of ​​our work is that, actually, what is required is not easy, but it is quantifiable. Global emissions at 1.8% per year is a goal that is not astronomical ", defends Raftery.

"If you say, 'Everything is a disaster and we have to radically reform society,' there is a feeling of hopelessness. But if we say, 'We need to cut emissions by 1.8% a year,' that's a different mindset."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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