Reacting to UNEP Report: Limiting Overshoot – Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return, CAN Europe’s Director, Chiara Martinelli, states:
Crossing 1.5°C must never mean abandoning the 1.5°C limit of the Paris Agreement. The goal remains because every fraction of a degree matters, and because climate justice demands that we limit the impacts that fall first and hardest on communities that have contributed least to this crisis.
The reality of a temporary overshoot being unavoidable should sharpen, not weaken, our resolve. Years of insufficient mitigation ambition since the Paris Agreement have brought us to this point, but the choices governments make now will determine how high temperatures rise, how long we remain above 1.5°C, and whether we can bring them back down.
This requires immediate and deep emissions cuts across all greenhouse gases, including rapid reductions in methane, alongside the protection and restoration of the ecosystems on which both climate mitigation and our resilience depend. Returning temperatures towards 1.5°C remains possible, but it becomes harder and more uncertain with every day of delay.
While there is a need for increasingly removing carbon from the atmosphere, the report’s findings are not a blank cheque for pursuing questionable technologies that come with high risks. Rather it is critical to focus on researching and developing solutions while being aware of the risks, trade-offs, limits and need for strong governance.
Extreme caution should be practiced around pretending to know what living in a 1.8°C or a 2°C world would mean. Climate risks do not increase neatly or predictably, and the probability of irreversible impacts grows as temperatures rise. Mitigation and adaptation therefore needs to advance together: cutting emissions as fast as possible while investing now in protecting people, nature and societies from impacts that are already unavoidable.
This report brings a crucial contribution to the current debate, while we witness yet again the devastating impact of the climate emergency across the globe.
ENDS
For more information and media requests:
Tomas Spragg Nilsson, tomas.spraggnilsson@caneurope.org, +46707656392