Study: 92% of the world's countries are threatened by very hot years

Almost every country in the world may set record high temperatures for a year every two years starting from 2030, according to a study published Thursday that stresses the huge responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions from the world's major polluters.

The study, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, intersects historical data on emissions with commitments made by the world's five most polluters - China, the United States, the European Union, India and Russia - ahead of COP26, with the aim of inferring projections for warming. climate in each region in the period up to the end of the current decade.

With this, 92% of the 165 countries surveyed are expected to experience very high temperatures every two years.

This finding "underscores the urgency of this issue and shows that we are heading toward a warmer world for everyone," says study co-author Alexander Knowles of the NGO Climate Analytics.

In order to shed light on the contribution of the most polluting countries in the world to this phenomenon, the researchers then modeled what the situation would have been without the contributions of these polluting forces since 1991.

It was found that the percentage of countries that may be affected by years of severe heat decreased as a result, to reach 46%.

Leah Busch of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) said the study highlights the "clear footprint" of major polluters across several regions of the world.

"I think it's very important, because generally we're talking about abstract amounts of emissions or global temperatures that we know but we can't feel," she told AFP.

The disturbance will be particularly noticeable in the African tropics “since they are regions where the year-to-year differences are generally small, the moderate increase that you would experience, compared to other regions, would take them out of their known climate pattern,” she says.

The strongest increases in temperature affect the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, a phenomenon that has been observed before.

A significant drop in emissions could mitigate the consequences of rising temperatures, according to the study's authors.

However, the United Nations considers that the world will witness a 13.7 percent increase in emissions with the current commitments of countries by 2030, far from the need to reduce emissions by 50 percent in order to achieve the ideal goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which is to contain global warming by +1 5 °C for the pre-industrial age.

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