UN Secretary-General António Guterres told world leaders gathered in the Brazilian Amazon on Thursday that breaching the 1.5°C warming threshold is now unavoidable, calling the inaction on climate change a “moral failure” and “deadly negligence.”

“The hard truth is that we have failed to ensure we remain below 1.5 degrees,” Guterres said in a speech ahead of the COP30 UN Climate Conference, which begins Monday in Belém. “Science now tells us that a temporary overshoot beyond the 1.5 limit, starting at the latest in the early 2030s, is inevitable.”

The global conference in the heart of the world’s largest rainforest will open with reduced attendance; fewer than 60 world leaders confirmed their presence as compared with more than 80 at COP29 last year in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Paradigm shift needed to limit duration and magnitude of  1.5°C overshoot

Guterres spoke of the need for a “paradigm shift” to limit the magnitude and duration of the overshoot of the landmark Paris Agreement, struck in 2015, to keep average temperatures below 1.5°C.

Now that the 1.5°C target has already been overshot for the last [12 months/year] in a row, the emphasis needs to be placed on bringing those average temperatures back down to that benchmark before the century’s end.

That, he said, can still be done through more rapid and drastic emissions cuts, a faster phase-out of fossil fuels, and reducing emissions of short-lived climate pollutants like black carbon, tropospheric ozone and methane, which persist in the atmosphere only weeks, months or years, as compared to CO2, which lingers for centuries. Increased investments in adaptation strategies are also needed to cope with current warming trends.

Studies have shown that reducing these “superpollutants” can more rapidly ‘bend the curve’ of emissions, and even lower average temperatures by as much as 0.5°C within 10-20 years. They would also lower toxic air pollution concentrations of particulates (PM2.5) and ground-level ozone, yielding massive health co-benefits.

“Let us be clear: the 1.5°C limit is a red line for humanity,” Guterres said. “It must be kept within reach.”

NDC commitments show weak political commitment

World on Track for 2.8°C Warming as Paris Agreement Overshoot Now Inevitable

National commitments would cut emissions by just 12% – less than a quarter of what is needed

Guterres’ comments follow the publication of the UN Emissions Gap Report released Tuesday, projecting the world is heading toward 2.8°C of warming by the century’s end under current policies. Only 60 of 193 countries submitted updated emissions reductions targets in their Nationally Determined Contributions by the September deadline.

If fully implemented, far from a guarantee based on climate action promises over the past decade, global emission reduction plans would cut global carbon output by just 12% by 2035, compared to 2019 levels. That’s less than a quarter of the 55% reduction by 2035 that scientists say is needed to keep the planet’s atmosphere under the 1.5°C Paris Agreement benchmark.

“Nations have had three attempts to deliver promises made under the Paris Agreement, and each time they have landed off target,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said this week. “While national climate plans have delivered some progress, it is nowhere near fast enough.”

In a glimmer of hope ahead of COP30, the European Union announced late Wednesday that its 27 nations agreed to a binding 2040 climate target of 90% emissions reductions from 1990 levels, setting the stage for the bloc’s position as a leader on ambition in Brazil.

“Every fraction of a degree matters in terms of lives lost, in terms of losses and damages, in terms of the risk of irreversible tipping points,” said Anne Olhoff, chief scientific editor of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report.

“The challenge has increased significantly because of the lack of action over the last five years. When we come up with the global numbers, they do not reflect how big a task this is. It’s a monstrous task. Assuming that we could just turn around the whole world, changing the entire way that the economy works overnight, is naive,” Olhoff said.

Health caught in climate crossfire

As leading emitters drag their feet on climate action, the death toll of climate inaction continues to mount.

Human-caused global warming claimed an estimated 546,000 lives annually from heat exposure in each of the last ten years, around one heat-related death every minute, according to the Lancet Countdown released last week.

Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion killed 2.52 million people in 2022, and contributes to nearly 8 million deaths worldwide, according to WHO figures.

Nina Renshaw, head of health at the Clean Air Fund, called the toll “an insane death spiral” in comments to Health Policy Watch.

Climate change is projected to cause up to 15.6 million annual deaths by 2050 in a business as usual scenario, yet only 0.5% of multilateral climate finance has been directed toward health sector adaptation since 2004, according to analysis released Thursday by Adelphi, a Berlin-based think tank.

Adaptation woefully underfunded

Increased investments in adaptation are urgently needed to cope with current warming trends. Along with emissions targets, that issue will also be on the agenda at COP30.

Countries have identified $2.54 billion in costed health sector needs related to national adaptation plans, but only 0.1% of that is currently covered by funding.

Broader adaptation finance requirements will exceed $310 billion annually by 2035, 12 times current flows, according to UNEP.

“Climate impacts are accelerating. Yet adaptation finance is not keeping pace, leaving the world’s most vulnerable exposed to rising seas, deadly storms, and searing heat,” Guterres said. “Adaptation is not a cost, it is a lifeline.”

The shortfall threatens the “Baku to Belém Roadmap,” a plan agreed at COP29 to scale climate finance to $300 billion from developed nations by 2035, with an aspirational target of $1.3 trillion. That total is split between investments in emissions reductions and adaptation measures, leaving the finance gap for both far off track for the real needs of countries on the frontlines of the crisis.

Fossil fuel tap says on

Despite the accelerating crisis, direct fossil fuel subsidies reached nearly $1 trillion across 73 countries in 2023. Including indirect subsidies [such as health costs and environmental damage], the global figure rises to over $7 trillion, according to the International Monetary Fund.

With pressure on the private sector declining due to shifting political winds in nations ranging from COP30 host Brazil to the United States, companies and banks are backtracking on their own green targets. The 100 largest oil and gas companies have production strategies that would exceed their share of 1.5°C-consistent production by 189% in 2040.

“What’s still missing is political courage,” Guterres said. “Fossil fuels still command vast subsidies, taxpayers’ money. Too many corporations are making record profits from climate devastation, with billions spent on lobbying, deceiving the public and obstructing progress.”

Andersen noted the disconnect. “We are not seeing anyone reducing their oil production,” she said. “We are seeing a step up on renewables and various other things — energy efficiency, carbon capture, forestry — but actually looking at [reducing fossil fuel] production is not there.”

US denies climate data 

The United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement in January and is not sending any representatives to COP30. President Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly in January that climate change was “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” dismissing it as a “green scam” and calling UN predictions “nonsense.”

The US State Department inserted a disclaimer into the UNEP Emissions Gap Report stating the United States “does not support” the report. Andersen said the US even requested its data be removed. “That’s obviously impossible, because it’s one planet, one atmosphere and one impact,” she said.

Guterres laid out three imperatives for COP30: countries must agree on a credible response plan to close the emissions gap and reduce temperatures to 1.5°C, demonstrate a clear path to delivering the promised $1.3 trillion in annual climate finance, and ensure developing countries receive a “climate justice package” covering adaptation, loss and damage, and transition support.

“It’s no longer time for negotiations. It’s time for implementation, implementation and implementation,” he said.

“No one can bargain with physics,” Guterres warned. “But we can choose to lead, or be led to ruin.”

Image Credits: CCAC , Wikipedia Commons.