IPCC report: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sees politics at a crossroads

With a delay of six hours and a now-or-never appeal, the third working group of the intergovernmental Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered its part on the new, sixth status report in Geneva on Monday.

The multi-hundred-page report deals with the possibilities of reducing the climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions to such an extent that the goals of the Paris climate agreement are achieved and thus global warming is limited to below two degrees - ideally to 1.5.

"We are now at a crossroads," said the IPCC chairman, South Korean Hoesung Lee, when presenting the more than 60-page summary for policymakers.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.

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The paper was formulated in a two-week process and agreed with government representatives from all of the almost 200 countries involved in the climate convention.

For eight years, scientists from around the world had reviewed and evaluated thousands of new studies to determine the chances of limiting global warming.

The key data compared to earlier IPCC assessment reports have not changed radically.

When the report was presented, it was said that the “window of possibilities will close” before the end of this decade.

The coming years are crucial.

So far, global warming has averaged just under 1.2 degrees since the beginning of industrialization.

Greenhouse gas emissions would need to be cut by almost half in all sectors - from transport to industry, heat and power generation to agriculture and forestry - for emissions to peak before 2025 and fall rapidly thereafter.

43 percent is the mark by 2030. In 2050, climate neutrality must then be achieved.

All-time high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere

The reality in recent years is different: Between 2010 and 2019, emissions continued to rise, from 53 to 66 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents - an all-time high of new greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

However, the growth rate in the past decade has declined slightly compared to the previous decade.

According to the IPCC authors, this is mainly due to climate protection progress that is related to the spread of climate-friendly technologies in many countries.

These include progressive electrification, savings through greater energy efficiency and, in some regions, the reduction in deforestation.

Since 2010, the costs for regenerative energies have fallen continuously by 85 percent.

Overall, the unit costs for many low-emission technologies have gradually fallen since 2010.

Felix Creutzig from the Berlin Mercator Institute MCC, one of the numerous German co-authors of the IPCC report, sees a clear trend: "In the countries that have started to reduce their emissions, economic growth is also increasing." At least 18 countries have one permanent emission reduction achieved.

According to the IPCC, the current rate of emission reduction is not sufficient to achieve the Paris goals and prevent dangerous climate change.

"Without deep cuts, it won't be manageable," said one of the report's lead authors, Priyadarshi Shukla, on Monday.

In order to limit global warming to at least two degrees, global emissions would have to be reduced by a quarter by 2030 and climate neutrality would have to be achieved by 2070 at the latest.

But even in that case, in order to achieve the necessary technical transformations, the turnaround in the still growing greenhouse gas emissions must be initiated by the middle of this decade.

In the discussions between the scientists and the government representatives from various coal and oil-exporting countries, the formulation of how the need for fossil fuels could be maintained in the years to come was debated right to the end.

The fact that the 1.5-degree target could be exceeded at times and that CDR techniques could be used to extract greenhouse gases from the air played less of a role in the final talks.

Rather, the IPCC emphasized that huge investments in "green" technologies for rapid emission reduction are now needed immediately: by 2030, the financial flows in the area of ​​climate-friendly technologies in all sectors must increase threefold to sixfold.

Closing the "investment gap" promises enormous advantages: if you include the savings in climate damage costs, the trillions in investments in climate protection could reduce global value creation "by at most a few percentage points".