A report released by the United Nations Friday revealed that that the plan of 150 countries to simply cut their carbon emissions will not suffice in keeping global warming at bay. The question now is what else can be done to save the planet.
The plans - Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) - have been drafted by the countries in preparation for a Paris summit from November 30 to December 11. They are expected to make a U.N. deal to battle global warming beginning 2020, according to The Christian Science Monitor.
The UN "synthesis" report was made prior to the meeting in an attempt to assess the pledges the countries have made to cut their emissions. There is good news and there is bad news to the report.
The good news - countries have increased their plans of cutting greenhouse gas emissions greatly. The bad news - fast forward to 2025 or 2030, global emissions will continue rising despite best efforts.
According to the report, world emissions would be restricted to 56.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2030. This is four billion less than before, which is 49.0 billion back in 2010.
"It is a very good step... but it is not enough," according to U.N. Climate Change Secretariat Christiana Figueres while presenting the report in Bonn.
Figueres also said that the countries at the Paris summit must agree to further increase action in the following years, adding that the new agreement must incorporate the INDCs and that the pledges must be periodically reviewed.
"Many countries have been healthily conservative about what they have put forward," Figueres said, singling out China as a country likely to make bigger emission reductions than originally pledged.
Another good news tied to the UN climate change report is that the new pledges mean that the rate of growth of emissions will lessen even as the emissions continue to rise, according to The Washington Post.
Below is an image proving this point:
This is the impact of national #climateaction plans covering 146 countries: https://t.co/3BKea7vsED #COP21 #INDCs pic.twitter.com/7gaW3DxRn8
— UN Climate Action (@UNFCCC) October 30, 2015
Global warming, or the rising temperatures in the atmosphere, causes natural calamities such as droughts and typhoons to worsen. It causes the Earth's climate to change and sea levels to rise, exacerbating floods in several places in the world.
The INDC documents have been submitted during the 1992 United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change, a convention that led to the global treaty of almost 200 countries to pledge to prevent "dangerous" climate change.
The upcoming Paris summit on November 30 is reportedly the 21st conference of parties to the 1992 treaty. Much is expected and hoped for following the summit, one of which is that an agreement will be met by all countries to aggressively combat climate change.
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