Communities may be forced to relocate or change livelihoods

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has said the global temperature is set to cross 1.5°C within the next few years, pushing climate risks and impacts to increasingly dangerous heights.

UNEP said there was still the possibility to bring temperatures down and achieve global goals in the Paris Agreement through interventions that achieve both mitigation and adaptation goals such as nature-based cooling.

It also said strong political will, effective policies, inclusive governance, and finance should be prioritised as enabling conditions for action and equity.

The leading global voice on the environment revealed this in the new report themed: “Limiting overshoot”, which identifies an overshoot, peak and decline pathway as the best remaining option to minimise the magnitude and how to return to below 1.5°C as soon as possible.

UNEP said the best the planet could hope for on its current emissions trajectory was warming of about 1.8ºC above pre-industrial levels this century.

The United Nations agency argued that this pathway would minimise peak temperature rise through immediate and sustained cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, on the road to net-zero and bring down temperatures through long-term net-negative emissions, with carefully governed Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

It noted that CDR is the process of removing carbon from the air and storing it through afforestation or other means, which is an essential part of the mix.

Executive Director of UNEP, Inger Andersen, said: “There are no good outcomes if we remain above 1.5°C. Across the globe, extreme heat waves are already proving that climate impacts will strike faster, hit harder, and last longer – costing more lives and causing deeper disruption.” UN Secretary-General Antőnio Guterres observed that: “This summer’s scorching heat, raging wildfires and deadly floods are a warning of what lies ahead. We must make the overshoot above 1.5 degrees as small and short as possible. That demands an overshoot of ambition.”