The mood around Cop30, the UN climate change summit in Belem, Brazil, is distinctly sombre. Is that justified or tactical manoeuvring by the numerous activists and lobbyists among the 50,000 attendees that have descended on the modest Amazon city?
The answer lies in assessing progress since Cop21 in Paris in 2015. All recent reports agree on salient insights that should hearten the Belem delegates. Although absolute volumes of greenhouse gases are at record level, carbon dioxide emission growth has slowed from 1.7 per cent annually in the decade before Paris to 0.3 per cent afterwards. Its peak is now projected in 2030, with some suggestions that emissions could already be declining.
Similar downward trends are evident with the more lethal (in terms of global heating) greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as methane, nitrous oxide and fluorocarbons. If this continues through the gathering momentum of actions under way, total GHGs would reduce by 2035 to a level compatible with 1.5°C warming above pre-industrial levels, well short of the catastrophic 2°C red-lighted in Paris.
Thus, the breaching of 1.5°C by a marginal 0.05 °C in 2024 – the warmest year on record – is serious but does not spell imminent doom.
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