The all-important Long-Term Global Goal (LTGG) aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C and pursues efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. Parties have agreed to periodically review the adequacy of the LTGG as well as the progress towards achieving it. ECO has listened very carefully to the presentations made by the IPCC in the Structured Expert Dialogue and in an effort to help both the co-facilitators and the Parties with further work on the Review, wants to offer five messages on the Second Periodic Review to all Parties:
- Climate impacts are already happening with devastating consequences for both humans and natural ecosystems, and every tenth of a degree increase in the global average temperature brings additional risks which will continue to escalate once we go beyond 1.5°C and in some cases may prove irreversible even if the overshoot is temporary. These impacts are hitting the most vulnerable the hardest, thereby increasing poverty and injustice. There is no equity in delaying climate action. The IPCC clearly showed that there are limits to adaptation and that going beyond 1.5°C will make adaptation increasingly difficult and will further increase loss and damage.
- While emission reduction and limitation commitments have been made under the Paris Agreement, they are far from sufficient and need to be deepened and broadened. Other commitments, such as the developed countries’ pledge to mobilize $100 billion annually in climate finance, have yet to be fulfilled. Parties clearly will need to do more to live up to the Long Term Global Goal.
- Given that greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase rather than peaking and starting to decline, only one of the IPCC’s five Illustrative Mitigation Pathways in the IPCC’s latest assessment fits the Long Term Global Goal: the pathway that foresees no or a limited overshoot of 1.5°C and has a 90 per cent chance of limiting temperature rise to below 2°C (as anything less than 90 per cent would be hard to match the “well below” 2°C qualification of the Paris Agreement).
- Achieving the LongTerm Global Goal requires transformative action as well as behavioural change and must include a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel use and an immediate and substantive shift of financial flows away from fossil fuels and towards clean energy systems. This demonstrates how the discussions underway in the context of the Second Periodic Review are clearly linked to what happens in the Global Stocktake and the Mitigation Work Programme.
- Given that countries have differing levels of historical responsibility and different capacities to take action, a differentiated approach to countries’ contributions to achieving the 1.5°C target will be needed, both in terms of domestic contributions to emission reductions as well as in the provision of necessary climate finance, technology transfer and capacity building.
ECO hopes these messages can be useful for further work in the run-up to COP27 which clearly needs to reaffirm that any overshoot of the 1.5°C global temperature limitation goal will be devastating for people and for the nature we all rely on.