A UN climate report released Wednesday finds the globe will unavoidably slip past the Paris Climate Agreement’s 1.5-degree Celsius warming target in the next few years. The task now, the report states, is to make the period of warming “overshoot” as limited as possible, eventually bringing global average temperatures back down.
The annual UN Emissions Gap report is designed to inform decision makers headed into the next round of global climate talks in Turkey, known as COP31, next month. While past gap reports have expressed skepticism about meeting the 1.5-degree target, this one marks the first time that its authors have pronounced that missing the mark will be “imminent and unavoidable.”
