The secretary general of the United Nations has warned that humanity must 'change course now' after failing to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Speaking before next month's COP30 climate summit in Brazil, António Guterres said that overshooting the target set in the Paris climate agreement is 'inevitable'.
He warns that the consequences of this will be 'devastating'.
"Let’s recognise our failure," Guterres told the Guardian. "The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs."
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Guterres urged world leaders to take action, saying the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger will be and said the top priority of COP30 needs to be shifting direction.
He said: "It is absolutely indispensable to change course in order to make sure that the overshoot is as short as possible and as low in intensity as possible to avoid tipping points like the Amazon.
"We don’t want to see the Amazon as a savannah. But that is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible."
The past ten years have seen global temperatures rise to between 1.24C and 1.28C hotter than pre-industrial levels.
This makes it the hottest decade on record.
Despite this, the secretary general says global action had come up short with less than a third of the world’s nations having sent in their climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), under the Paris Agreement.
On top of this, the US under Donald Trump's presidency has abandoned the agreement altogether.
Guterres says that the NDCS received so far have been massively under-ambitious.
"From those [NDCs] received until now, there is an expectation of a reduction of emissions of 10 percent. We would need 60 percent [to stay within 1.5C]. So overshooting is now inevitable."
But he hasn't given up. While overshooting the 1.5C target is unavoidable, Guterres believes that it may still be possible to bring temperatures down in time to return to 1.5C by the end of the century but it will require real commitment from government leaders at both COP30 and beyond.
COP30 is set to take place in Belém, Brazil, from 10 to 21 November 2025.
Topics: World News, Global Warming, Environment
Bec Oakes