Post-Paris, the gap between reductions needed to reach the global goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C and countries’ pledged reductions remains too wide. Between now and 2018, Parties need to figure out how to close that gap.
The science is clear. The only way to achieve the Paris Agreement commitments is to stop new development of fossil fuels and keep most of the world’s remaining fossil fuels in the ground.
Communities across all continents are taking up the call and demand that their countries halt the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. In Argentina, indigenous Mapuche communities are mobilising to defend their traditional territories and halt corporate efforts to exploit the planet’s second-largest deposit of shale gas. In Australia, ranchers and other landowners are joining the Lock the Gate movement to block coal mining and unconventional natural gas operations. In the U.S., Sioux protectors in Standing Rock are defending their sovereignty to fight efforts to bulldoze sacred sites to build a $3.8 billion pipeline. This pipeline would threaten water supplies and facilitate the export of dirty fracked crude from the Bakken Shale. In the Philippines, the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development together with other groups are at the centre of a national movement against coal mining and other dirty fossil fuel extraction. The movement combating fossil fuel development is powerful, global and growing.
This people power can’t just go unnoticed by Parties. The time is now to increase their pre-2020 ambition by ceasing investments in fossil fuel production and infrastructure.