The UN Environment Programme published a preliminary update to its assessment of the emissions gap, which includes the new commitments to mitigating climate change made during COP26.
The update, published on Tuesday morning, includes 33 new mitigation pledges, 31 of which are updates to nationally determined contributions. The new pledges take the total considered in the report to 152, which covers 88% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The new pledges lead to a reduction of 0.7 gigatonnes of CO2 in the 2030 global emissions forecast relative to the report as it was originally published at the end of October.
That means the aggregate impact of the 2021 pledges will be a reduction of 4.8 gigatonnes of CO2 in 2030 emissions versus the pledges made in 2010.
Despite the progress, the gap remains vast. Even assuming all the prerequisites are in place for conditional NDCs to be met, emissions in 2030 need to be brought down a further 9 gigatonnes to limit climate change to 2 degrees, and a further 23.5 gigatonnes to limit it to 1.5 degrees.
Some 76% of global domestic emissions are now covered by net zero announcements, compared to the 57% covered by commitments at the time of the report’s original publication. This is thanks to 25 new net zero pledges, five of which came from the G20, meaning only Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa have not yet pledged to cut carbon emissions to zero.
South Africa will receive $8.5bn from the UK, USA, France, Germany and EU to decarbonise its electricity production.
The stated aim of COP26 is to secure global net zero and to keep the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees within reach. Tom Evans, a researcher at E3G, said that the update to the report “lays down the challenge for ministers arriving in Glasgow today for the final stretch of talks.”
Since the gap looks unlikely to be closed at this COP, a possible positive outcome might be that countries agree to update their NDCs more frequently than the usual five year cycle, hopefully encouraging them to shift their trajectories more rapidly.
Evans called this an “obvious first step”, noting that it has been endorsed by the High Ambition Coalition — the group behind the Paris Agreement. The least developed countries and small island states who are most vulnerable to the impact of climate change are also pushing for more frequent updates to NDCs.
