Climate finance needs to rise sharply to 5 trillion U.S. dollars a year globally by 2030 to fund measures to fight climate change, researchers said on Thursday warning that transformation across economies is too slow to meet international temperature goals.
From transport to agriculture and electricity, progress is lagging in all sectors on reducing planet-heating emissions at the pace required to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid its worst effects, a study by five green groups found.
None of the 40 indicators it assessed are in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of reining in average temperature rise to well below 2 degrees C, and ideally 1.5 degrees C, above pre-industrial times.
Of the indicators, 25 were judged to be “well off track” or “off-track”, including using less dirty coal to generate power and boosting climate finance.
But the study did note some bright spots, such as wider adoption of wind and solar energy, and more electric vehicles on the road.
“Although there are some encouraging signs of progress in a few sectors, overall global climate mitigation efforts are still falling woefully short,” said Sophie Boehm, one of the authors. She is from the World Resources Institute, a United States-based think-tank that worked on the study.
Boehm said the findings should provide a “clear-eyed view” of the effort needed as governments head to the United Nations COP26 Summit that kicks off on Sunday.
“We’re going to need world leaders at COP26 and beyond to ramp up that (climate) ambition and action immediately,” Boehm told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Two UN reports warned this week that the world is “way off track” to cap rising temperatures, with current national pledges set to result in an average 2.7 degrees C temperature increase this century.
The COP26 conference in Scotland has been billed as the last major chance to galvanize the collective effort needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C, with scientists calling for greenhouse gas emissions to be cut by nearly half by 2030 to achieve that.
Sticking to the 1.5 degrees C limit will not prevent extreme weather worsening or sea levels rising but is seen as vital to avert runaway impacts on humans and the planet’s ecosystems, including widespread hunger and forced migration.
The study called for a significant ramping up of investments to fight climate change, especially for developing countries.
Globally, it said finance must rise eightfold to meet the estimated 5 trillion U.S. dollars needed annually for climate action by 2030 – or an average increase of 436 billion a year this decade.
A separate annual assessment released this month by the analysis group Climate Policy Initiative showed that global climate finance averaged 632 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 and last year, a 10 percent rise from 2017-2018, but the rate of increase slowed from earlier years.
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